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LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



1. Hyperion 20 

2. Outre-Mer 20 

3. The Happy Boy 10 

4. Arne 10 

5. Frankenstein 10 

6. TheLastof theMohicans.20 

7. Clytie 20 

8. The Moonstone, Part 1 . 10 

9. The Moonstone, Part II. 10 

10. Oliver Twist 20 

11. The Coining Race 10 

12. Leila . 10 

13. The Three Spaniards ... 20 

14. The Tricks of the Greeks. 20 

15. L'Abbe Constantin 20 

16. Freckles 20 

17. The Dark Colleen 20 

18. They were Married 10 

19. Seekers After God 20 

20. The Spanish Nun 10 

21. Green Mountain Boys.. 20 

22. Fleurette 20 

23. Second Thoughts 20 

24. The New Magdalen 20 

25. Divorce 20 

26. Life of Washington 20 

27. Social Etiquette 15 

28. Single Heart, Double 

Face 10 

29. Irene; or, The Lonely 

Manor 20 

30. Vice Versa 20 

31. Ernest Maltravers .,.20 

32. The Haunted House. ..10 

33. John Halifax 20 

34. 800 Leagues on the 
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35. The Cryptogram 10 

36. Life of Marion 20 

3 7. Paul and Virginia 10 

38. A Tale of Two Cities .... 20 

39. The Hermits 20 

40. An Adventure in Thule, 
etc 10 

41. A Marriage in High Life20 

42. Robin 20 

43. Two on a Tower 20 

44. Rasselas 10 

45. Alice ; a sequel to Er- 

nest Maltravers 20 

46. Duke of Kandos 20 

47. Baron Munchausen 10 

48. A Princess of Thule 20 

49. The Secret Despatch.. . .20 

50. Early Days of Christian- 
ity, 2 Parts, each 20 

51. Vicar of Wakefield 10 

52. Progress and Poverty ... 20 

53. The Spy 20 

54. East Lynne 20 

55. A Strange Story 20 

56. Adam Bede, Part 1 15 

Adam Bede, Part II 15 

57. The Golden Shaft 20 

58. Portia 20 

59. Last Days of Pompeii. . . 20 

60. The Two Duchesses 20 

61. TomBrown'sSchoolDays.20 

62. Wooing O't, 2 Pts. each. 1 s 

63. The Vendetta 20 

64. Hypatia, Part 1 15 

« Hypatia, Part I J ...... 15 



84. 

85. 
86. 
87. 
88. 
89. 
90. 
91. 

92. 
93- 
94. 

95- 

96. 

97- 

98. 

99. 
100. 
101. 
102. 
103. 
104. 
105. 
106. 
107. 

108. 
109. 



"3- 
114. 

US- 
116. 
117. 
j 18. 
119. 
120. 
121. 
122. 
123. 
124. 
125. 
126. 



Selma 15 

Margaret and her Brides- 
maids 20 

Horse Shoe Robinson, 

2 Parts, each 15 

Gulliver's Travels 20 

Amos Barton 10 

The Berber 20 

Silas Marner 10 

Queen of the County . . .20 

Life of Cromwell 15 

Jane Eyre 20 

Child'sHist'ry of Engl'd.20 

Molly Bawn 20 

Pillone 15 

Phyllis 20 

Romola, Part 1 15 

> Romola, Part II 15 

Science in ShortChapters.20 

Zanoni 20 

A Daughter of Heth 20 

Right and Wrong Uses of 

the Bible 20 

Night and Morning, Pt. 1. 1 5 
NightandMorningjPt.II 15 

Shandon Bells 20 

Monica 10 

Heart and Science 20 

The Golden Calf 20 

The Dean's Daughter. . . 20 

Mrs. Geoffrey 20 

Pickwick Papers, Part 1 . 20 
Pickwick Papers,Part 1 1. 20 

Airy, Fairy Lilian 20 

Macleod of Dare 20 

Tempest Tossed, Part 1. 20 
Tempest Tossed, P't 1 1. 20 
Letters from High Lat- 
itudes 20 

Gideon Fleyce 20 

India and Ceylon 20 

The Gypsy Queen 20 

The Admiral's Ward 20 

Nimport, 2 Parts, each.. 15 

Harry Holbrooke. 20 

Tritons, 2 Parts, each . . 15 
Let Nothing You Dismay. 10 
LadyAudley's Secret... 20 
Woman's Place To-day. 20 
Dunallan, 2 parts, each. 15 
Housekeeping and Home 

making 15 

No New Thing 20 

The SpoopendykePapers. 20 

False Hopes 15 

Labor and Capital 20 

Wanda, 2 parts, each ... 15 
More Words about Bible. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, P't. 1. 20 
Monsieur Lecocq, Pt. 1 1. 20 
An Outline of Irish Hist. 10 

The Lerouge Case 20 

Paul Clifford 20 

A New Lease of Life ... 20 

Bourb* Lilies 20 

Other x i.ople's Money. .20 

Lady of Lyons 10 

Amel ne de Bourg 15 

A Sea Queen 20 

The Ladies Lindores. ..20 

Haunted Hearts 10 

Loys, Lord Beresford. . .20 



128. 
129. 
130- 

131. 
132. 

133. 

134. 
*35. 

136. 
13 7- 

138. 
139- 
140. 



Under Two Flags, Pt I. 20 
Under Two Flags, Pt II. 20 

Money ic 

In Peril of His Life 20 

India; What can it teach 
us? 20 

iets and Flashes 20 
loonshine and Margue- 
rites ....io 

Mr. Scarborough's 
Family, 2 Parts, earh . . 15 ' 

Arden 15 

Tower of Percemont ... .20 

Yolande 20 

Cruel London 20 

The Gilded Clique 20 

Pike County Folks 20 

Cricket on the Hearth. . 10 

Henry Esmond 20 

Strange Adventures of a 

Phaeton 20 

Denis Duval 10 

01dCuriosityShop,P't 1. 15 
OldCuriosity Shop, P' rt 1 1 . 1 5 

Ivanhoe, Part 1 15 

Ivanhoe, Part II 15 , 

White Wings 20 

The Sketch Book 20 

Catherine 10 

Janet's Repentance 10 

Barnaby Rudge, Part L. 15 
Barnaby Rudge, Part II. 15 

Felix Holt 20 

Richelieu 10 

Sunrise, Part 1 15 

Sunrise, Part II 15 

Tour of the World in 80 

Days 20 

Mystery of Orcival 20 

Lovel, the Widower 10 

Romantic Adventures of 

a Milkmaid 10 

DavidCopperfield.Part T.20 
DavidCopperfield,P'rt II. 20 

Charlotte Temple 10 

Rienzi, 2 Parts, each ... 15 
Promise of Marriage .... 10 

Faith and Unfaith 20 

The Happy Man 10 

Barry Lyndon 20 

Eyre's Acquittal 10 

20,000 Leagues Under the 

Sea 20 

Anti-Slavery Days 20. 

Beauty's Daughters 20 g 

Beyond the Sunri^f 20 

Hard Times 

Tom Cringle's Log 

Vanity Fair 

Underground Russia 
Middlemarch, 2 Pts. e 

Sir Tom 

Pelham | 

The Story of Ida.... 

Madcap Violet ' Sb 

The Little Pilgrim..; fh ■ 

Kilmeny o 

Whist, or BumblepUfrt • \W'j 
That Beautiful Wretf bj 
Her Mother's Sin..{ J 
Green Pastures, etc. 
Mysterious Island, F 




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ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. 

Edited by JOHN MORLEY. 
Published in 12mo. vols., paper covers, price 10 cents each. 



Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. 
Scott. By R. H. Hnttou. 
Gibbon. By J C. Morison. 
Shelhey. By J. A. Symonds. 
Hume. By Prof. Huxley, P.R.S. 
Goldsmith. By William Black. 
Defoe. By W. Minto. 
Burns. By Principal Shairp. 
Spenser. By the Very Rev. the Dean 
of St. Paul's. 



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Buntan. By J. A. Froude. 
Pope. By Leslie Stephen. 
Byron. By Professor Nichol. 
Cowper. By Goldwin Smith 
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WORDSWORTH 



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A portion of the gift is won 
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On ground which British shepherds tread" 



e Ywr ■tj.«*\t, \**<t 



s 

CONTENTS, 



CHAPTER I. 

Paqb. 

Birth and Education.— Cambridge 7 



CHAPTER II. 
Residence in London and in France 16 

CHAPTER III. 

Miss Wordsworth. — Lyrical Ballads.— Settlement at Gras- 
mere 23 

CHAPTER IV. 
The English Lakes .31 

CHAPTER V. 
Marriage — Society. — Highland Tour 41 

CHAPTER VI. 
Sir George Beaumont. — Death of John Wordsworth . . 47 

CHAPTER VII. 

<: Happy Warrior," and Patriotic Poems 55 

(5) 



6 CONTENTS. 



Page. 
CHAPTER VIII. 

Children. — Life at Rydal Mount. — "The Excursion" . 60 



CHAPTER IX. 
Poetic Diction.— "Laodamia." — "Evening Ode" . . 71 

CHAPTER X. 

Natural Religion .......... 83 

CHAPTER XL 

Italian Tour. — Ecclesiastical Sonnets. — Political Views. — 
Laureateship 102 

CHAPTER XII. 

Letters on The Kendal and Windermere Railway.— Con- 
clusion in 



WORDSWORTH. 

CHAPTER I. 

BIRTH AND EDUCATION. — CAMBRIDGE. 

I CANNOT, perhaps, more fitly begin this short biography than 
with some words in which its subject has expressed his own feel- 
ings as to the spirit in which such a task should be approached. 
" Silence,' 1 says Wordsworth, "is a privilege of the grave, a right 
of the departed : let him, therefore, who infringes that right by speak- 
ing publicly of, for, or against those who cannot speak for themselves, 
take heed that he opens not his mouth without a sufficient sanction. 
Only to philosophy enlightened by the affections does it belong 
justly to estimate the claims of the deceased, on the one hand, and 
of the present age and future generations, on the other, and to 
strike a balance between them. Such philosophy runs a risk of 
becoming extinct among us, if the coarse intrusions into the re- 
cesses, the gross breaches upon the sanctities, of domestic life, to 
which we have lately been more and more accustomed, are to be 
regarded as indications of a vigorous state of public feeling. The 
wise and good respect, as one of the noblest characteristics of 
Englishmen, that jealousy of familiar approach which, while it con- 
tributes to the maintenance of private dignity, is one of the most 
efficacious guardians of rational public freedom." 

In accordance with these views the poet entrusted to his nephew, 
the present Bishop of Lincoln, the task of composing memoirs of 
his life, in the just confidence that nothing would by such hands 
be given to the world which was inconsistent with the dignity either 
of the living or of the dead. From those memoirs the facts con- 
tained in the present work have been for the most part drawn. It 
has, however, been my fortune, through hereditary friendships, to 
have access to many manuscript letters and much oral tradition 
bearing upon the poet's private life;* and some details and some 
passages of letters hitherto unpublished will appear in these pages. 
It would seem, however, that there is but little of public interest in 

* I take this opportunity of thanking Mr. William Wordsworth, the son, and Mr. William 
Wordsworth, the grandson, of the poet, for help most valuable in enabling me to give a 
true impression of the poet's personality. 

(7) 



8 WORDSWORTH. 

Word?Wrth's life which has not already been given to the world, 
and I have shrunk from narrating such minor personal incidents as 
he would himself have thought it needless to dwell upon. I have 
endeavoured, in short, to write as though the Subject of this biog- 
raphy were himself its Auditor, listening, indeed, from some region 
where all of truth is discerned and nothing but truth desired, but 
checking by his venerable presence any such revelation as public 
advantage does not call for, and private delicacy would condemn. 

As regards the critical remarks which these pages contain, I 
have only to say that I have carefully consulted such notices of the 
poet as his personal friends have left us, and also, 1 believe, nearly 
every criticism of importance which has appeared on his works. 
I find with pleasure that a considerable agreement of opinion exists 
— though less among professed poets or critics than among men of 
eminence in other departments of thought or action whose attention 
has been directed to Wordsworth's poems. And although I have 
felt it right to express in each case my own views with exactness, I 
have been able to feel that I am not obtruding on the reader any 
merely fanciful estimate in which better accredited judges would 
refuse to concur. 

Without further preface I now begin my story of Wordsworth's 
life, in words which he himself dictated to his intended biographer. 
" I was born," he said, " at Cockermouth, in Cumberland, on April 
7th, 1770, the second son of John Wordsworth, attorney-at-law — as 
lawyers of this class were then called — and law-agent to Sir James 
Lowther, afterwards Earl of Lonsdale. My mother was Anne, only 
daughter of William Cookson, mercer, of Penrith, and of Dorothy, 
born Crackanthorp, of the ancient family of that name, who from 
the times of Edward the Third had lived in Newbiggen Hall, West- 
moreland. My grandfather was the first of the name of Words- 
worth who came into Westmoreland, where he purchased the small 
estate of Sockbridge. He was descended from a family who had 
been settled at Peniston, in Yorkshire, near the sources of the Don, 
probably before the Norman Conquest. Their names appear on 
different occasions in all the transactions, personal and public, con- 
nected with that parish ; and I possess, through the kindness of 
Colonel Beaumont, an almery, made in 1525, at the expense of a 
William Wordsworth, as is expressed in a Latin inscription carved 
upon it, which carries the pedigree of the family back four genera- 
tions from him. The time of my infancy and early boyhood was 
passed partly at Cockermouth, and partly with my mother's parents 
at Penrith, where my mother, in the year 1778, died of a decline, 
brought on by a cold, in consequence of being put, at a friend's 
house in London, in what used to be called ' a best bedroom.' 
My father never recovered his usual cheerfulness of mind after 
this loss, and died when I was in my fourteenth year, a school-boy, 
just returned from Hawkshead, whither I had been sent with my 
elder brother Richard, in my ninth year. 

" I remember my mother only in some few situations, one of 
which was her pinning a nosegay to my breast, when I was going to 



WORDSWORTH. 

catechism in the church, as was customary before Easter. An 
intimate friend of hers told me that she once said to her that the 
only one of her five children about whose future life she was anx- 
ious was William ; and he, she said, would be remarkable, either 
for good or for evil. The cause of this was that I yas of a 
stiff, moody, and violent temper ; so much so that I remember 
going once into the attics of my grandfather's house at Penrith, 
upon some indignity having been put upon me, with an intention of 
destroying myself with one of the foils which I knew war, kept ihere. 
I took the foil in hand, but my heart failed. Upon another occa- 
sion, while I was at my grandfather's house atjPenrith, along with my 
eldest brother, Richard, we were whipping tops together in the 
large drawing-room, on which the carpet was only laid down upon 
particular occasions. The walls were hung round with family 
pictures, and I said to my brother, ' Dare you strike your whip 
through that old lady's petticoat?' He replied, 'No, I won't.' 
' Then,' said I, 'here goes!' and I struck my lash through her 
hooped petticoat ; for which, no doubt, though I have forgotten 
it, I was properly punished. But, possibly from some want of 
judgment in punishments inflicted, I had become perverse and 
obstinate in defying chastisement, and rather proud of it than 
otherwise. 

" Of my earliest days at school I have little to say, but that they 
were very happy ones, chiefly because I was left at liberty then, 
and in the vacations, to read whatever books I liked. For ex- 
ample, I read all Fielding's works, Don Quixote, Gil Bias, and any 
part of Swift that I liked — Gulliver's Travels, and the Tale of a 
Tub, being both much to my taste. It may be, perhaps, as well to 
mention that the first verses which I wrote were a task imposed by 
my master — the subject, The Smnwpr Vgrflfinit ■ and of my own 
accord I added others upon Return to School. There was nothing 
remarkable in either poem ; ~~rJuTi was called upon, among other 
scholars, to write verses upon the completion of the second cen- 
tenary from the foundation of the school in 1585 by Archbishop 
Sandys. These verses were much admired — far more than they 
deserved, for they were but a tame imitation of Pope's versification, 
and a little in his style." 

But it was not from exercises of this kind that Wordsworth's 
school-days drew their inspiration. No years of his life, perhaps, 
were richer in strong impressions; but they were impressions 
derived neither from books nor from companions, but from the 
majesty and loveliness of the scenes around him ; — from Nature, 
his iife-long mistress, loved with the .irst heats of youth. To her 
influence we shall again recur ; it will be most convenient first to 
trace Wordsworth's progress through the curriculum of ordinary 
education. 

It was due to the liberality of Wordsworth's two uncles, 
Richard Wordsworth and Christopher Crackanthorp (under whose 
care he and his brothers were placed at their father's death, in 
1783), that his education was prolonged beyond his school-days. 



io WORDSWORTH. 

For Sir James Lowther, afterwards Lord Lonsdale — whose agent 
Wordsworth's father. Mr. John Wordsworth, was — becoming 
aware that his agent had about 5000/. at the bank, and wishing, 
partly on political grounds, to make his power over him absolute, 
had forcibly borrowed this sum of him, and then refused to repay 
it. After Mr. John Wordsworth's death much of the remaining 
fortune which he left behind him was wasted in efforts to compel 
Lord Lonsdale to refund this sum ; but it was never recovered till 
his death in 1801, when his successor repaid 8500/. to the Words- 
worths, being a full acquittal, with interest, of the original debt. 
The fortunes of the Wordsworth family were, therefore, at a low 
ebb in 1787, and much credit is due to the uncles who discerned 
the talents of William and Christopher, and bestowed a Cambridge 
education on the future Poet Laureate, and the future Master of 
Trinity. 

In October, 1787, then, Wordsworth went up as an undergradu- 
ate to St. John's College, Cambridge. The first court of this 
College, in the south-western corner of which were Wordsworth's 
rooms, is divided only by a narrow lane from the Chapel of Trinity 
College, and his first memories are of the Trinity clock, telling the 
hours "twice over, with a male and female voice," of the pealing 
organ, and of the prospect when 

" From my pillow looking forth, by light 
Of moon or favouring stars I could behold 
The antechapel, where the statue stood 
Of Newton with his prism and silent face, 
The marble index of a mind for ever 
Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone." 

For the most part, the recollections which Wordsworth brought 
away from Cambridge are such as had already found expression 
more than once in English literature ; for it has been the fortune 
of that ancient University to receive in her bosom most of that 
long line of poets who form the peculiar glory of our English 
speech. Spenser, Ben Jonson, and Marlowe ; Dryden, Cowley, 
and Waller ; Milton, George Herbert, and Gray — to mention only 
the most familiar names — had owed allegiance to that mother who 
received Wordsworth now, and Coleridge and Byron immediately 
after him. " Not obvious, not obtrusive, she ; " but yet her sober 
dignity has often seemed no unworthy setting for minds, like 
Wordsworth's, meditative without languor, and energies advancing 
without shock or storm. Never, perhaps, has the spirit of Cam- 
bridge been more truly caught than in Milton's Penseroso ; for 
this poem obviously reflects the seat of learning which the poet 
had lately left, just as the Allegro depicts the cheerful rusticity of 
the Buckinghamshire village which was his new home. And thus 
the Penseroso was understood by Gray, who, in his Installation 
Ode, introduces Milton among the bards and sages who lean from 
heaven, 



WORDSWORTH. H 

" To bless the place where, on their opening soul 
First the genuine ardour stole." 

" 'Twas Milton struck the deep-toned shell," and invoked with 
the old affection the scenes which witnessed his best and early 
years : 

" Ye brown o'er-arching groves, 
That contemplation loves, 
Where willowy Camus lingers with delight f 
Oft at the blush of dawn 
I trod your level lawn, 

Oft wooed the gleam of Cynthia silver-bright 
In cloisters dim, far from the haunts of Folly, 
With Freedom by my side, and soft-eyed Melancholy." 

And Wordsworth also " on the dry smooth-shaven green " paced 
on solitary evenings " to the far-off curfew's sound," beneath those 
groves of forest-trees among which " Philomel still deigns a song " 
and the spirit of contemplation lingers still ; whether the silent 
avenues stand in the summer twilight filled with fragrance of the 
lime, or the long rows of chestnut engirdle the autumn river-lawns 
with walls of golden glow, or the tall elms cluster in garden or 
Wilderness into towering citadels of green. Beneath one exquisite 
ash-tree, wreathed with ivy, and hung in autumn with yellow tassels 
from every spray, Wordsworth used to linger long. "Scarcely 
Spenser's self," he tells us, 

" Could have more tranquil visions in his youth, 
Or could more bright appearances create 
Of human forms with superhuman powers, 
Than I beheld loitering on calm, clear nights 
Alone, beneath this fairy work of earth." 

And there was another element in Wordsworth's life at Cam- 
bridge more peculiarly his own — that exultation which a boy born 
among the mountains may feel when he perceives that the delight 
in the external world which the mountains have taught him has not 
perished by uprooting, nor waned for want of nourishment in field 
or fen ; that even here, where nature is unadorned, and scenery, as 
it were, reduced to its elements — where the prospect is but the 
plain surface of the earth, stretched wide beneath an open heaven 
— even here he can still feel the early glow, can take delight in that 
broad and tranquil greenness, and in the august procession of the 
day. 

" As if awakened, summoned, roused, constrained, 
I looked for universal things ; perused 
The common countenance of earth and sky — 
Earth, nowhere unembellished by some trace 
Of that first Paradise whence man was driven ; 
And sky, whose beauty and bounty are expressed 
By the proud name she bears — the name of Heaven." 



j 2 WORDS IVOR TH. 

Nor is it only in these open air scenes that Wordsworth has added 
to the long tradition a memory of his own. The " storied windows 
richly dight," which have passed into a proverb in Milton's song, 
cast in King's College Chapel the same " soft chequerings " upon 
their framework of stone while Wordsworth watched through the 
pauses of the anthem the winter afternoon's departing glow : — 

" Martyr, or King, or sainted Eremite, 
Whoe'er ye be that thus, yourselves unseen, 
Imbue your prison-bars with solemn sheen, 
Shine on until ye fade with coming Night." 

From those shadowy seats whence Milton had heard " the pealing 
organ blow to the full-voiced choir below," Wordsworth too gazed 
upon — 

" That branching roof 
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells 
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells 
Lingering, and wandering on as loth to die — 
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof 
That they were born for immortality." 

Thus much, and more, there was of ennobling and unchange- 
able in the very aspect and structure of that ancient University, by 
which Wordsworth's mind was bent towards a kindred greatness. 
But of active moral and intellectual life there was at that time little 
to be found within her walls. The floodtide of her new life had 
not yet set in ; she was still slumbering, as she had slumbered 
long, content to add to her majesty by the mere lapse of genera- 
tions, and increment of her ancestral calm. Even had the intel- 
lectual life of the place been more stirring, it is doubtful how far 
Wordsworth would have been welcomed, or deserved to be wel- 
comed, by authorities or students. He began residence at seven- 
teen, and his northern nature was late to flower. There seems, in 
fact,' to have been even less of visible promise about him than we 
should have expected : but rather something untamed and insubor- 
dinate, something heady and self-confident; an independence that 
seemed only rusticity, and an indolent ignorance which assumed 
too readily the tones of scorn. He was as yet a creature of the 
lakes and mountains, and love for Nature was only slowly leading 
him to love and reverence for man. Nay, such attraction as he 
had hitherto felt for the human race had been interwoven with her 
influence in a way so strange that to many minds it will seem a 
childish fancy not worth recounting. The objects of his idealiza- 
tion had been Cumbrian shepherds — a race whose personality 
seems to melt into Nature's— who are united as intimately with 
moor and mountain as the petrel with the sea. 

" A rambling school-boy, thus 
I felt his presence in his own domain 
As of a lord and master — or a power, 
Or genius, under Nature, under God, 



WORDS IVOR TH. j 3 

Presiding ; and severest solitude 

Had more commanding looks when he was there. 

When up the lonely brooks on rainy days 

Angling I went, or trod the trackless hills 

By mists bewildered, suddenly mine eyes 

Have glanced upon him distant a few steps, 

In size a giant, stalking through thick fog, 

His sheep like Greenland bears; or, as he stepped 

Beyond the boundary line of some hill-shadow 

His form hath flashed upon me, glorified 

By the deep radiance of the setting sun ; 

Or him have I descried in distant sky, 

A solitary object and sublime, 

Above all height ! like an aerial cross 

Stationed alone upon a spiry rock 

Of the Chartreuse, for worship. Thus was man 

Ennobled outwardly before my sight ; 

And thus my heart was early introduced 

To an unconscious love and reverence 

Of human nature ; hence the human form 

To me became an index of delight, 

Of grace and honour, power and worthiness." 

i" This sanctity of Nature given to man " — this interfusion of 
human interest with the sublimity of moor and hill — formed a typi- 
cal introduction to the manner in which Wordsworth regarded 
mankind to the end — depicting him as set, as it were, amid imper- 
sonal influences, which make his passion and struggle but a little 
thing ; as when painters give but a strip of their canvas to the 
fields and cities of men, and overhang the narrowed landscape with 
the space and serenity of heaven. 

To this distant perception of man — of man "purified, removed, 
and to a distance that was fit " — was added, in his first summer va- 
cation, a somewhat closer interest in the small joys and sorrows of 
the villagers of Hawkshead — a new sympathy for the old Dame in 
whose house the poet still lodged, for " the quiet woodman in the 
woods," and even for the " frank-hearted maids of rocky Cumber- 
land," with whom he delighted to spend an occasional evening in 
dancing and country mirth. And since the events in thispoet'slife 
are for the most part inward and unseen, and depend upon some 
shock and coincidence between the operations of his spirit and the 
cosmorama of the external world, he has recorded with especial 
emphasis a certain sunrise which met him as he walked homewards 
from one of these scenes of rustic gaiety — a sunrise which may be 
said to have begun that poetic career which a sunset was to close : 

" Ah ! need I say, dear Friend, that to the brim 
My heart was full ; I made no vows, but vows 
Were then made for me ; bond unknown to me 
Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, 
A dedicated Spirit." 

His second long vacation brought him a further gain in human 



I4 WORDSWORTH. 

affections. His sister, of whom he had seen little for some years, 
was with him once more at Penrith, and with her another maiden, 

" By her exulting outside look of youth 
And placid under-countenance, first endeared ; " 

whose presence now laid the foundation of a love which was to be 
renewed and perfected when his need for it was full, and was to be 
his support and solace to his life's end. His third long vacation 
he spent in a walking tour in Switzerland. Of this, the common- 
est relaxation of studious youth, he speaks as of an " unprecedent- 
ed course," indicating " a hardy slight of college studies and their 
set rewards." And it seems, indeed, probable that Wordsworth 
and his friend Jones were actually the first undergraduates who 
ever spent their summer in this way. The pages of the Preludt 
which narrate this excursion, and especially the description of the 
crossing of the Simplon — 

" The immeasurable height 
Of woods decaying, never to be decayed " 

form one of the most impressive parts of that singular autobio- 
graphical poem, which, at first sight so tedious and insipid, seems 
to gather force and meaning with each fresh perusal. These pages, 
which carry up to the verge of manhood the story of Wordsworth's 
career, contain, perhaps, as strong and simple a picture as we shall 
anywhere find of hardy English youth — its proud self-sufficingness 
and careless independence of all human things. Excitement, and 
thought, and joy, seem to come at once at its bidding ; and the 
chequered and struggling existence of adult men seems something 
which it need never enter, and hardly deigns to comprehend. 

Wordsworth and his friend encountered on his tour many a 
stirring symbol of the expectancy that was running through the 
nations of Europe. They landed at Calais "on the very eve of 
that great federal day " when the Trees of Liberty were planted 
all over France. They met on their return 

" The Brabant armies on the fret 
For battle in the cause of liberty." 

But the exulting pulse that ran through the poet's veins could 
hardly yet pause to sympathise deeply even with what in the world's 
life appealed most directly to ardent youth. 

" A stripling, scarcely of the household then 
Of social life, I looked upon these things 
As from a distance ; heard, and saw, and felt- 
Was touched, but with no intimate concern. 
I seemed to move along them as a bird 
Moves through the air, or as a fish pursues 



WORDS WOK TH. Y - 

Its sport or feeds in its proper element. 

I wanted not that joy, I did not need 

Such help. The ever-living universe, 

Turn where I might, was opening out its glories ; 

And the independent spirit of pure youth 

Called forth at every season new delights, 

Spread round my steps like sunshine o'er green fields." 



!6 WORDSWORTH. 



CHAPTER II. 

RESIDENCE IN LONDON AND IN FRANCE. 

Wordsworth took his B.A. degree in January, 1791, and 
quitted Cambridge with no fixed intentions as to his future career. 
" He did not feel himself," he said long afterwards, "good enough 
for the Church ; he felt that his mind was not properly disciplined 
for that holy office, and that the struggle between his conscience 
and his impulses would have made life a torture. He also shrank 
from the law. He had studied military history with great interest, 
and the strategy of war ; and he always fancied that he had talents 
for command ; and he at one time thought of a military life ; but 
then he was without connexions, and he felt if he were ordered to 
the West Indies his talents would not save him from the yellow 
fever, and he gave that up." He therefore repaired to London, 
and lived there for a time on a small allowance, and with no definite 
aim. His relations with the great city were of a very slight and 
external kind. He had few acquaintances, and spent his time 
mainly in rambling about the streets. His descriptions of this 
phase of his life have little interest. There is some flatness in an 
enumeration of the nationalities observable in a London crowd, 
concluding thus — ■ 

" Malays, Lascars, the Tartar, the Chinese, 
And Negro Ladies in white muslin gowns." 

But Words worth's limitations were inseparably connected with 
his strength. And just as the flat scenery of Cambridgeshire had 
only served to intensify his love for such elements of beauty and 
grandeur as still were present in sky and fen, even so the bewilder- 
ment of London taught him to recognise with an intenser joy such 
fragments of things rustic, such aspects of things eternal, as were 
to be found amidst that rush and roar. To the frailer spirit of 
Hartley Coleridge the weight of London might seem a load im- 
possible to shake off. " And what hath Nature," he plaintively 
asked — 

" And what hath Nature but the blank void sky 
And the thronged river toiling to the main ? " 

But Wordsworth saw more than this. He became, as one may 
say, the poet not of London considered as London, but of London 



WORDSWORTH. ^ 

considered as a part of the country. Like his own Farmer of 
Tilsbury Vale — 

" In the throng of the Town like a Stranger is he, 
Like one whose own Country's far over the sea ; 
And Nature, while through the great city he hies, 
Full ten times a day takes his heart by surprise." 

Among the poems describing these sudden shocks of vision 
and memory none is more exquisite than the Reverie of Poor 

Susan : 

" At the corner of Wood Street, when daylight appears, 
Hangs a Thrush that sings loud, it has sung for three years 
Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard 
In the silence of morning the song of the Bird. 

" 'Tis a note of enchantment ; what ails her ? She sees 
A mountain ascending, a vision of trees; 
Bright volumes of vapour through Lothbury glide, 
And a river flows on through the vale of Cheapside." 

The picture is one of those which come home to many a country 
heart with one of those sudden " revulsions into the natural" which 
philosophers assert to be the essence of human joy. But noblest 
and best known of all these poems is the Sonnet on Westminster 
Bridge, "Earth hath not anything to show more fair; " in which 
Nature has reasserted her dominion over the works of all the mul- 
titude of men ; and in the early clearness the poet beholds the 
great City — as Sterling imagined it on his dying bed — " not as full 
of noise and dust and confusion, but as something silent, grand, 
and everlasting." And even in later life, when Wordsworth was 
often in London, and was welcome in any society, he never lost 
this external manner of regarding it. He was always of the same 
mind as the group of listeners in his Power of Music : 

" Now, Coaches and Chariots ! roar on like a stream ! 
Here are twenty Souls happy as souls in a dream : 
They are deaf to your murmurs, they care not for you, , 
Nor what ye are flying, nor what ye pursue ! " 

He never made the attempt — vulgarised by so many a " fashion- 
able novelist," and in which no poet has succeeded yet — to disen- 
tangle from that turmoil its elements of romance and of greatness ; 
to enter that realm of emotion where Nature's aspects become the 
scarcely noted accessory of vicissitudes that transcend her own ; 
to trace the passion or the anguish which whirl along some lurid 
vista towards a sun that sets in storm, or gaze across silent squares 
by summer moonlight amid a smell of dust and flowers. 

But although Wordsworth passed thus through London unmod- 
ified and indifferent, the current of things was sweeping him on to 
mingle in a fiercer tumult — to be caught in the tides of a more vio- 



1 8 WORDSWORTH. 

lent and feverish life. In November, 1791, he landed in France, 
meaning to pass the winter at Orleans and learn French. Up to 
this date the French Revolution had impressed him in a rather 
unusual manner— namely, as being a matter of course. The ex- 
planation of this view is a somewhat singular one. Wordsworth's 
was an old family, and his connexions were some of them wealthy 
and well placed in the world : but the chances of his education had 
been such that he could scarcely realise to himself any other than 
a democratic type of society. Scarcely once, he tells us, in his 
school days had he seen boy or man who claimed respect on the 
score of wealth and blood ; and the manly atmosphere of Cam- 
bridge preserved even in her lowest days a society 

" Where all stood thus far 
Upon equal ground ; that we were brothers all 
In honour, as in one community, 
Scholars and gentlemen ; " 

vhile the teachings of nature and the dignity of Cumbrian peasant 
life had confirmed his high opinion of the essential worth of man. 
The upheaval of the French people, therefore, and the downfall of 
privilege, seemed to him no portent for good or evil, but rather the 
tardy return of a society to its stable equilibrium. He passed 
through revolutionised Paris with satisfaction and sympathy, but 
with little active emotion, and proceeded first to Orleans, and then 
to Blois, between which places he spent nearly a year. At Orleans 
he became intimately acquainted with the nobly-born but repub- 
lican General Beaupuis, an inspiring example of all in the Revolu- 
tion that was self-devoted and chivalrous, and had compassion on 
the wretched poor. In conversation with him Wordsworth learnt 
with what new force the well-worn adages of the moralist fall from 
the lips of one who is called upon to put them at once in action, 
and to stake life itself on the verity of his maxims of honour. The 
poet's heart burned within him as he listened. He could not, in- 
deed, help mourning sometimes at the sight of a dismantled chapel, 
or peopling in imagination the forest-glades in which they sat with 
the chivalry of a "by-gone day. But he became increasingly ab- 
sorbed in his friend's ardour, and the Revolution — mulier for?7iosa 
superne — seemed to him big with all the hopes of man. 

He returned to Paris in October, 1792 — a month after the mas- 
sacres of September ; and he has described his agitation and dis- 
may at the sight of such world-wide destinies swayed by the hands 
of such men. In a passage which curiously illustrates that rea- 
soned self-confidence and deliberate boldness which for the most 
part he showed only in the peaceful incidents of a literary career, 
he has told us how he was on the point of putting himself forward 
as a leader of the Girondist party, in the conviction that his single- 
heartedness of aim would make him, in spite of foreign birth and 
imperfect speech, a point round which the confused instincts of 
the multitude might not impossibly rally. 

Such a course of action — which, whatever its other results, 



WORDS WOK TH. j g 

would undoubtedly have conducted him to the guillotine with his 
political friends in May, 1793 — was rendered impossible by a some- 
what undignified hindrance. Wordsworth, while in his own eyes 
"a patriot of the world," was in the eyes of others a young man of 
twenty-two, travelling on a small allowance, and running his head 
into unnecessary dangers. His funds were stopped, and he re- 
luctantly returned to England at the close of 1792. 

And now to Wordsworth, as to many other English patriots, 
there came, on a great scale, that form of sorrow which in private 
life is one of the most agonising of all — when two beloved beings, 
each of them erring greatly, become involved in bitter hate. The 
new-born Republic flung down to Europe as her battle-gage the 
head of a king. England, in an hour of horror that was almost 
panic, accepted the defiance, and war was declared between the 
two countries early in 1793. " No shock," says Wordsworth, 

Given to my moral nature had I known 
Down to that very moment ; neither lapse 
Nor turn of sentiment that might be named 
A revolution, save at this one time ; " 

and the sound of the evening gun-fire at Portsmouth seemed at 
once the embodiment and the premonition of England's guilt and 
woe. 

Yet his distracted spirit could find no comfort in the thought of 
France. For in France the worst came to the worst; and every 
thing vanished of liberty except the crimes committed in her name- 
Most melancholy at that time, O Friend ! 
Were my day-thoughts, my nights were miserable. 
Through months, through years, long after the last beat 
Of those atrocities, the hour of sleep 
To me came rarely charged with natural gifts — 
Such ghastly visions had I of despair, 
And tyranny, and implements of death ; . . . 
And levity in dungeons, where the dust 
Was laid with tears. Then suddenly the scene 
Changed, and the unbroken dream entangled me 
In long orations, which I strove to plead 
Before unjust tribunals — with a voice 
Labouring, a brain confounded, and a sense, 
Death-like, of treacherous desertion, felt 
In the last place of refuge — my own soul." 

These years of perplexity and disappointment, following on a 
season of overstrained and violent hopes, were the sharpest trial 
through which Wordsworth ever passed. The course of affairs in 
France, indeed, was such as seemed by an irony of fate to drive 
the noblest and firmest hearts into the worst aberrations. For 
first of all in that Revolution, Reason had appeared, as it were, in 
visible shape, and hand in hand with Pity and Virtue ; then, as the 
welfare of the oppressed peasantry began to be lost sight of amid 
the brawls of the factions of Paris, all that was attractive and en- 



2 o WORDS IVOR TH. 

thusiastic in the great movement seemed to disappear, but yet 
Reason might still be thought to find a closer realization here than 
among scenes more serene and fair ; and, lastly, Reason set in blood 
and tyranny, and there was no more hope from France. But those 
who, like Wordsworth, had been taught by that great convulsion to 
disdain the fetters of sentiment and tradition, and to look on Rea- 
son as supreme, were not willing to relinquish their belief because 
violence had conquered her in one more battle. Rather they clung 
with the greater tenacity — " adhered," in Wordsworth's words, 

" More firmly to old tenets, and to prove 
Their temper, strained them more ; " 

cast off more decisively than ever the influences of tradition, and 
in their Utopian visions even wished to see the perfected race 
severed in its perfection from the memories of humanity, and from 
kinship with the struggling past. 

Through a mood of this kind Wordsworth had to travel now. 
And his nature, formed for pervading attachments and steady mem- 
ories, suffered grievously from the privation of much which even 
the coldest and calmest temper cannot forego without detriment 
and pain. For it is not with impunity that men commit themselves 
to the sole guidance of either of the two great elements of their be- 
ing. The penalties of trusting to the emotions alone are notorious ; 
and every day affords some instance of a character that has degen- 
erated into a bundle of impulses, of a will that has become caprice. 
But the consequences of making Reason our tyrant instead of our 
king are almost equally disastrous. There is so little which Rea- 
son, divested of all emotional or instinctive supports, is able to 
prove to our satisfaction that a sceptical aridity is likely to take 
possession of the soul. It was thus with Wordsworth ; he was 
driven to a perpetual questioning of all beliefs and analysis of all 
motives — 

" Till, demanding formal proof, 
And seeking it in everything, I lost 
All feeling of conviction ; and, in fine, 
Sick, wearied out with contrarieties, 
Yielded up moral questions in despair." 

In this mood all those great generalised conceptions which are 
the food of our love, our reverence, our religion, dissolve away ; 
and Wordsworth tells us that at this time 

" Even the visible universe 
Fell under the dominion of a taste 
Less spiritual, with microscopic view 
Was scanned, as I had scanned the moral world." 

He looked on the operations of nature "in disconnection dull and 
spiritless ; " he could no longer apprehend her unity nor feel her 



WORDS WOR TH. 2 1 

charm. He retained, indeed, his craving for natural beauty, but 
in an uneasy and fastidious mood — 

" Giving way 
To a comparison of scene with scene, 
Bent overmuch on superficial things, 
Pampering myself with meagre novelties 
Of colour and proportion ; to the moods 
Of time and season, to the moral power, 
The affections, and the spirit of the place, 
Insensible." 

Such cold fits are common to all religions ; they haunt the ar= 
tist, the philanthropist, the philosopher, the saint. Often, they are 
due to some strain of egoism or ambition which has intermixed it- 
self with the impersonal desire ; sometimes, as in Wordsworth's 
case, to the persistent tension of a mind which has been bent too 
ardently towards an ideal scarce possible to man. And in this 
case, when the objects of a man's habitual admiration are true and 
noble, they will ever be found to suggest some antidote to the fa- 
tigues of their pursuit. We shall see as we proceed how a deep- 
ening, insight into the lives of the peasantry around him — the 
happiness and virtue of simple Cumbrian homes — restored to the 
poet a serener confidence in human nature, amid all the shame and 
downfall of such hopes in France. And that still profounder loss 
of delight in Nature herself — that viewing of all things " in dis- 
connection dull and spiritless," which, as it has been well said, is 
the truest definition of Atheism, inasmuch as a unity in the universe 
is the first element in our conception of God — this dark pathway 
also was not without its outlet into the day. For the God in Na- 
ture is not only a God of Beauty, but a God of Law; his unity can 
be apprehended in power as well as in glory ; and Wordsworth's 
mind, "sinking inward upon itself from thought to thought," found 
rest for the time in that austere religion — Hebrew at once and 
scientific, common to a Newton and a Job — which is fostered by 
the prolonged contemplation of the mere Order of the sum of 
things. 

" Not in vain 

I had been taught to reverence a Power 

That is the visible quality and shape 

And image of right reason." 

Not, indeed, in vain ! For he felt now that there is no side of 
truth, however remote from human interests, no aspect of the uni- 
verse, however awful and impersonal, which may not have power 
at some season to guide and support the spirit of man. When 
Goodness is obscured, when Beauty wearies, there are some souls 
which still can cling and grapple to the conception of eternal Law. 
Of such stern consolations the poet speaks as having restored 
him in his hour of need. But he gratefully acknowledges also 
another solace of a gentler kind. It was about this time (1795) 



22 WORDSWORTH. 

that Wordsworth was blessed with the permanent companionship of 
his sister, to whom he was tenderly attached, but whom, since child- 
hood, he had seen only at long intervals. Miss Wordsworth, after 
her father's death, had lived mainly with her maternal grandfather, 
Mr. Cookson, at Penrith; occasionally at Halifax with other rela- 
tions ; or at Forncett with her uncle, Dr. Cookson, Canon of Wind* 
sor. She was now able to join her favourite brother ; and in this 
gifted woman Wordsworth found a gentler and sunnier likeness of 
himself; he found a love which never wearied, and a sympathy 
fervid without blindness, whose suggestions lay so directly in his 
mind's natural course that they seemed to spring from the same in- 
dividuality, and to form at once a portion of his inmost being. The 
opening of this new era of domestic happiness demands a separate 
chapter. 



WORDSWORTH. 2 $ 



CHAPTER III. 

MISS WORDSWORTH. — LYRICAL BALLADS. — SETTLEMENT AT 
GRASMERE. 

From among many letters of Miss Wordsworth's to a beloved 
friend (Miss Jane Pollard, afterwards Mrs. Marshall, of Hallsteads), 
which have been kindly placed at my disposal, I may without im- 
propriety quote a few passages which illustrate the character and 
the affection of brother and sister alike. And first, in a letter 
(Forncett, February, 1792), comparing her brothers Christopher 
and William, she says : " Christopher is steady and sincere in his 
attachments. William has both these virtues in an eminent degree, 
and a sort of violence of affection, if I may so term it, which 
demonstrates itself every moment of the day, when the objects of 
his affection are present with him, in a thousand almost impercep- 
tible attentions to their wishes, in a sort of restless watchfulness 
which I know not how to describe, a tenderness that never sleeps, 
and at the same time such a delicacy of manner as I have observed 
in few men." And again (Forncett, June, 1793), she writes to the 
same friend : " I have strolled into a neighbouring meadow, where 
I am enjoying the melody of birds, and the busy sounds of a fine 
summer's evening. But oh ! how imperfect is my pleasure whilst 
I am alone ! Why are you not seated with me ? and my dear 
William, why is he not here also ? I could almost fancy that I see 
you both near me. I hear you point out a spot, where, if we could 
erect a little cottage and call it our own, we should be the happiest 
of human beings. I see my brother fired with the idea of leading 
his sister to such a retreat. Our parlour is in a moment furnished, 
our garden is adorned by magic; the roses and honeysuckles 
spring at our command ; the wood behind the house lifts its head, 
and furnishes us with a winter's shelter and a summer's noonday 
shade. My dear friend, I trust that erelong you will be, without 
the aid of imagination, the companion of my walks, and my clear 
William may be of our party. ... He is now going upon a tour in 
the west of England, with a gentleman who was formerly a school- 
fellow—a man of fortune, who is to bear all the expenses of the 
journey, and only requests the favour of William's company. He 
is perfectly at liberty to quit this companion as soon as anything 
more advantageous offers. But it is enough to say that I am likely to 
have the happiness of introducing you to my beloved brother. You 



24 WORDSWORTH. 

must forgive me for talking so much of him ; my affection hurries 
me on, and makes me forget that you cannot be so much interested 
in the subject as I am. You do not know him ; you do not know 
how amiable he is. Perhaps you reply, ' But I know how blinded 
you are.' Well, my dearest, I plead guilty at once; I must be 
blind ; he cannot be so pleasing as my fondness makes him. I am 
willing to allow that half the virtues with which I fancy him endowed 
are the creation of my love ; but surely I may be excused ! He was 
never tired of comforting his sister ; he never left her in anger ; 
he always met her with joy ; he preferred her society to every other 
pleasure — or rather, when we were so happy as to be within each 
other's reach, he had no pleasure when we were compelled to be 
divided. Do not, then, expect too much from this brother of whom 
I have delighted so to talk to you. In the first place, you must be 
with him more than once before he will be perfectly easy in conver- 
sation. In the second place, his person is not in his favour — at 
least I should think not ; but I soon ceased to discover this — nay, 
I almost thought that the opinion which I had formed was erro- 
neous. He is, however, certainly rather plain, though otherwise 
has an extremely thoughtful countenance ; but when he speaks it 
is often lighted up by a smile which I think very pleasing. But 
enough, he is my brother ; why should I describe him ? I shall be 
launching again into panegyric." 

The brother's language to his sister is equally affectionate. 
" How much do I wish," he writes in 1793, "that each emotion of 
pleasure or pain that visits your heart should excite a similar pleas- 
ure or a similar pain within me, by that sympathy which will 
almost identify us when we have stolen to our little cottage. ... I 
will write to my uncle, and tell him that I cannot think of going 
anywhere before I have been with you. Whatever answer he gives 
me, I certainly will make a point of once more mingling my trans- 
ports with yours. Alas ! my dear sister, how soon must this hap- 
piness expire ; yet there are moments worth ages." 

And again, in the same year, he writes, " Oh, my dear, dear 
sister! with what transport shall I again meet you! with what 
rapture shall I again wear out the day in your sight ! . . . I see 
you in a moment running, or rather flying, to my arms." 

Wordsworth was in all things fortunate, but in nothing more 
fortunate than in this, that so unique a companion should have 
been ready to devote herself to him with an affection wholly free 
from egoism or jealousy — an affection that yearned only to satisfy 
his subtlest needs, and to transfuse all that was best in herself into 
his larger being. And, indeed, that fortunate admixture or influence, 
whencesoever derived, which raised the race of Wordsworth to 
poetic fame, was almost more dominant and conspicuous in Dorothy 
Wordsworth than in the poet himself. "The shooting lights of 
her wild eyes " reflected to the full the strain of imaginative 
emotion which was mingled in the poet's nature with that spirit of 
steadfast and conservative virtue which has already given to the 
family a Master of Trinity, two Bishops, and other divines and 



WORDS IVOR TH. ^ 5 

scholars of weight and consideration. In the poet himself the con- 
servative and ecclesiastical tendencies of his character became 
more and more apparent as advancing years stiffened the movements 
of the mind. In his sister the ardent element was less restrained ; 
it showed itself in a most innocent direction, but it brought with it 
a heavy punishment. Her passion for nature and her affection for 
her brother led her into mountain rambles which were beyond her 
strength, and her last years were spent in a condition of physical 
and mental decay. 

But at the time of which we are now speaking there was, 
perhaps, no one in the world who could have been to the poet such 
a companion as his sister became. She had not, of course, his 
grasp of mind or his poetic power ; but her sensitiveness to nature 
was quite as keen as his, and her disposition resembled his " with 
sunshine added to daylight." 

" Birds in the bovver, and lambs in the green field, 

Could they have known her, would have loved ; methought 

Her very presence such a sweetness breathed, 

That flowers, and trees, and even the silent hills, 

And everything she looked on, should have had 

An intimation how she bore herself 

Towards them, and to all creatures." 

Her journal of a tour in Scotland, and her description of a week 
on Ullswater, affixed to Wordsworth's Guide to the Lakes — diaries 
not written for publication, but merely to communicate her own 
delight to intimate friends at a distance — are surely indescribably at- 
tractive in their naive and tender feeling, combined with a delicacy 
of insight into natural beauty which was almost a new thing in the 
history of the world. If we compare, for instance, any of her de- 
scriptions of the Lakes with Southey's, we see the difference be- 
tween mere literary skill, which can now be rivalled in many quar- 
ters, and that sympathetic intuition which comes of love alone. Even 
if we compare her with Gray, whose short notice of Cumberland 
bears on every page the stamp of a true poet, we are struck by the 
way in which Miss Wordsworth's tenderness for all living things 
gives character and pathos to her landscapes, and evokes from the 
wildest solitude some note that thrills the heart. 

"She gave me eyes, she gave me ears, 
And humble cares, and delicate fears ; 
A heart the fountain of sweet tears ; 
And love, and thought, and joy." 

The cottage life in her brother's company, which we have seen 
Miss Wordsworth picturing to herself with girlish ardour, was des- 
tined to be realised no long time afterwards, thanks to the un- 
looked-for outcome of another friendship. If the poet's sister was 
his first admirer, Raisley Calver', may fairly claim the second place. 
Calvert was the son of the steward of the Duke of Norfolk, who 



2 6 WORDS IVOR TH. 

possessed large estates in Cumberland. He attached himself to 
Wordsworth, and in 1793 and 1794 the friends were much together. 
Calvert was then attacked by consumption, and Wordsworth nursed 
him with patient care. It was found at his death that he had left 
his friend a legacy of 900/. " The act," says Wordsworth, " was 
done entirely from a confidence on his part that I had powers and 
attainments which might be of use to mankind. Upon the interest 
of the 900/. — 400/. being laid out in an annuity — with 200/. deducted 
from the principal, and 100/. a legacy to my sister, and 100/. more 
which the Lyrical Ballads have brought me, my sister and I con- 
trived to live seven years, nearly eight." 

Trusting in this small capital, and with nothing to look to in the 
future except the uncertain prospect of the payment of Lord Lons- 
dale's debt to the family, Wordsworth settled with his sister at 
Racedown, near Crewkere, in Dorsetshire, in the autumn of 1795, 
the choice of this locality being apparently determined by the offer 
of a cottage on easy terms. Here, in the first home which he had 
possessed, Wordsworth's steady devotion to poetry began. He 
had already, in 1792,* published two little poems, the Evening 
Walk and Descriptive Sketches, which Miss Wordsworth (to whom 
the Evening Walk was addressed) criticises with candour in a letter 
to the same friend (Forncett, February, 1792) : 

' ; The scenes which he describes have been viewed with a poet's 
eye, and are portrayed with a poet's pencil ; and the poem contains 
many passages exquisitely beautiful ; but they also contain many 
faults, the chief of which are obscurity and a too frequent use of 
some particular expressions and uncommon words ; for instance, 
?noveless, which he applies in a sense, if not new, at least different 
from its ordinary one. By ' moveless,' when applied to the swan, 
he means that sort of motion which is smooth without agitation ; it 
is a very beautiful epithet, but ought to have been cautiously used. 
The word viewless also is introduced far too often. I regret ex- 
ceedingly that he did not submit the works to the inspection of 
some friend before their publication, and he also joins with me in 
this regret." 

These poems show a careful and minute observation of nature, 
but their versification — still reminding us of the imitators of Pope 
— has little originality or charm. They attracted the admiration of 
Coleridge, but had no further success. 

At Racedown Wordsworth finished Guilt and Sorrow, a poem 
gloomy in tone and written mainly in his period of depression and 
unrest ; and wrote a tragedy called The Borderers, of which only a 
few lines show any promise of future excellence. He then wrote 
The Ruined Cottage, now incorporated in the First Book of the Ex* 
cursion. This poem, on a subject thoroughly suited to his powers, 
was his first work of merit; and Coleridge, who visited the quiet 
household in June, 1797, pronounces this poem " superior, I hesitate 
not to aver, to anything in our language which in any way resem- 

* The Memoirs say in 1793, but the following MS. letter of 1792 speaks of them as 
already published. 



WORDS WORTH. 



2 7 



bles it." In July, 1797, the Wordsworths removed to Alfoxden, a 
large house in Somersetshire, near Netherstowey, where Coleridge 
was at that time living. Here Wordsworth added to his income 
by taking as pupil a young boy, the hero of the trifling poem 
Anecdote for Fathers, a son of Mr. Basil Montagu ; and here he 
composed many of his smaller pieces. He has described the origin 
of the Ancient Mariner and the Lyrical Ballads in a well-known 
passage, part of which I must here repeat : 

" In the autumn of 1797, Mr. Coleridge, my sister, and myself started 
from Alfoxden pretty late in the afternoon, with a view to visit Linton, 
and the Valley of Stones near to it ; and as our united funds were very 
small, we agreed to defray the expense of the tour by writing a poem, to 
be sent to the New Monthly Magazine. In the course of this walk was 
planned the poem of the Ancient Mariner, founded on a dream, as Mr. 
Coleridge said, of his friend Mr. Cruikshank. Much the greatest part of 
the story was Mr. Coleridge's invention; but certain parts I suggested : 
for example, some crime was to be committed which was to bring upon 
the Old Navigator, as Coleridge afterwards delighted to call him, the 
spectral persecution, as a consequence of that crime and his own wander- 
ings. I had been reading in Shelvocke's Voyages, a day or two before, 
that while doubling Cape Horn they frequently saw albatrosses in that 
latitude, the largest sort of sea-fowl, some extending their wings twelve or 
thirteen feet. ' Suppose/ said I, ' you represent him as having killed one 
of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary spirits of 
these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.' The incident was 
thought fit for the purpose, and adopted accordingly. I also suggested the 
navigation of the ship by the dead man, but do not recollect that I had 
anything more to do with the scheme of the poem. We began the composi- 
tion together, on that to me memorable evening. I furnished two or three 
lines at the beginning of the poem, in particular — 

'And listened like a three years' child; 
The Mariner had his will.' 

As v\e endeavoured to proceed conjointly our respective manners proved 
so widely different, that it would have been quite presumptuous in me to 
do anything but separate from an undertaking upon which I could only 
have been a clog. The Ancient Mariner grew and grew, till it became 
too important for our first object, which was limited to our expectation of 
five pounds ; and we began to think of a volume, which was to consist, as 
Mr. Coleridge has told the world, of poems chiefly on supernatural sub- 
jects, taken from common life, but looked at, as much as might be, through 
an imaginative medium." 

The volume of Lyrical Ballads, whose first beginnings have 
here been traced, was published in the autumn of 1798, by Mr. 
Cottle, at Bristol. This volume contained several poems which 
have been justly blamed for triviality — as The Thorn, Goody Blake, 
The Idiot Boy; several in which, as in Simon Lee, triviality is 
mingled with much real pathos ; and some, as Expostulation and 
Reply and The Tables Turned, which are of the very essence of 
Wordswcrth's nature. It is hardly too much to say that, if these 



2 8 WORDS IVOR TH. 

two last-named poems — to the careless eye so slight and trifling — 
were all that had remained from Wordsworth's hand, they would 
have "spoken to the comprehending" of a new individuality, as 
distinct and unmistakable in its way as that which Sappho has left 
engraven on the world forever in words even fewer than these. 
And the volume ended with a poem which Wordsworth composed 
in 1798, in one day, during a tour with his sister to Tintern and 
Chepstow. The Lines writte?i above Tintern Abbey have become, 
as it were, the locus classicus, or consecrated formulary of the 
Wordsworthian faith. They say in brief what it is the work of the 
poet's biographer to say in detail. 

As soon as this volume was published Wordsworth and his sis- 
ter sailed for Hamburg, in the hope that their imperfect acquaint- 
ance with the German language might be improved by the heroic 
remedy of a winter at Goslar. But at Goslar they do not seem to 
have made any acquaintances, and their self-improvement consisted 
mainly in reading German books to themselves. The four months 
spent at Goslar, however, were the very bloom of Wordsworth's 
poetic career. Through none of his poems has the peculiar love- 
liness of English scenery and English girlhood shone more deli- 
cately than through those which came to him as he paced the 
frozen gardens of that desolate city. Here it was that he wrote 
Lucy Gray, and Ruth, and Nutting, and the Poet's Epitaph, and 
other poems known now to most men as possessing in its full fra- 
grance his especial charm. And here it was that the memory of 
some emotion prompted the lines on Lucy. Of the history of that 
emotion he has told us nothing ; I forbear, therefore, to inquire 
concerning it, or even to speculate. That it was to the poet's 
honour, I do not doubt ; but who ever learned such secrets rightly ? 
or who should wish to learn ? It is best to leave the sanctuary of 
all hearts inviolate, and to respect the reserve not only of the living 
but of the dead. Of these poems, almost alone, Wordsworth in 
his autobiographical notes has said nothing whatever. One of 
them he suppressed for years, and printed only in a later volume. 
One can, indeed, well imagine that there may be poems which a 
man may be willing to give to the world only in the hope that their 
pathos will be, as it were, protected by its own intensity, and that 
those who are worthiest to comprehend will be least disposed to 
discuss them. 

The autobiographical notes on his own works above alluded to 
were dictated by the poet to his friend Miss Isabella Fenwick, at 
her urgent request, in 1843, and preserve many interesting partic- 
ulars as to the circumstances under which each poem was com- 
posed. They are to be found printed entire among Wordsworth's 
prose works, and I shall therefore cite them only occasionally. Of 
Lucy Gray, for instance, he says — 

" It was founded on a circumstance told me by my sister, of a little 
girl who, not far from Halifax, in Yorkshire, was bewildered in a snow- 
storm. Her footsteps were tracked by her parents to the middle of the 



WORDSWORTH. 



29 



lock of a canal, and no other vestige of her, backward or forward, could 
be traced. The body, however, was found in the canal. The way in 
which the incident was treated, and the spiritualising of the character, 
might furnish hints for contrasting the imaginative influence which I have 
endeavoured to throw over common life, with Crabbe's matter-of-fact style 
of handling subjects of the same kind." 

And of the Lines written in Germany, 1798-99 — 

"A bitter winter it was when these verses were composed by the side 
of my sister, in our lodgings, at a draper's house, in the romantic imperial 
town of Goslar, on the edge of the Ilartz forest. So severe was the cold 
of this winter that, when we passed out of the parlour warmed by the stove, 
our cheeks were struck by the air as by cold iron. I slept in a room over 
a passage that was not ceiled. The people of the house used to say, rather 
unfeelingly, that they expected I should be frozen to death some night ; 
but with the protection of a pelisse lined with fur, and a dog's-skin bon- 
net, such as was worn by the peasants, I walked daily on the ramparts or 
on a sort of public ground or garden, in which was a pond. Here I had 
no companion but a kingfisher, a beautiful creature that used to glance by 
me. I consequently became much attached to it. During these walks I 
composed The Poet's Epitaph.'''' 

Seldom has there been a more impressive instance of the con- 
trast, familiar to biographers, between the apparent insignificance 
and the real importance of their hero in undistinguished youth. 
To any one considering Wordsworth as he then was — a rough and 
somewhat stubborn young man, who, in nearly thirty years of life, 
had seemed alternately to idle without grace and to study without 
advantage — it might well have seemed incredible that he could have 
anything new or valuable to communicate to mankind. Where had 
been his experience ? or where was the indication of that wealth 
of sensuous emotion which in such a nature as Keats's seems 
almost to dispense with experience, and to give novelty by giving 
vividness to such passions as are known to all ? If Wordsworth 
were to impress mankind it must be, one might have thought, by 
travelling out of himself altogether — by revealing some such energy 
of imagination as can create a world of romance and adventure in 
the shyest heart. But this was not so to be. Already Words- 
worth's minor poems had dealt most entirely with his own feelings, 
and with the objects actually before his eyes ; and it was at Goslar 
that he planned, and on the day of his quitting Goslar that he be- 
gan, a much longer poem, whose subject was to be still more in- 
timately personal, being the development of his own mind. This 
poem, dedicated to Coleridge, and written in the form of a confi- 
dence bestowed on an intimate friend, was finished in 1805, but was 
not published till after the poet's death Mrs. Wordsworth then 
named it The Prelude, indicating thus the relation which it bears 
to the Excursion — or, rather, to the projected poem of the Recluse, 
of which the Excursion was to form only the Second out of three 
Divisions. One Book of the First Division of the Recluse was 
written, but is yet unpublished ; the Third Division was never even 



3° 



WORDSWORTH. 



begun, and "the materials," we are told, "of which it would have 
been formed have been incorporated, for the most part, in the 
author's other publications." Nor need this change of plan be re- 
gretted : didactic poems admit easily of mutilation ; and all that can 
be called plot in this series of works is contained in the Prelude, 
in which we see Wordsworth arriving at those convictions which in 
the Excursion he pauses to expound. 

It would be too much to say that Wordsworth has been wholly 
successful in the attempt — for such the Prelude virtually is — to 
write an epic poem on his own education. Such a poem must 
almost necessarily appear tedious and egoistic, and Wordsworth's 
manner has not tact enough to prevent these defects from being 
felt to the full. On the contrary, in his constant desire frugally to 
extract, as it were, its full teaching from the minutest event which 
has befallen him, he supplements the self-complacency of the auto- 
biographer with the conscientious exactness of the moralist, and is 
apt to insist on trifles such as lodge in the corners of every man's 
memory, as if they were unique lessons vouchsafed to himself alone. 

Yet it follows from this very temper of mind that there is 
scarcely any autobiography which we can read with such implicit 
confidence as the Prelude. In the case of this, as of so many of 
Wordsworth's productions, our first dissatisfaction at the form 
which the poem assumes yields to a recognition of its fitness to 
express precisely what the poet intends. Nor are there many 
men who, in recounting the story of their own lives, could combine 
a candour so absolute with so much of dignity ; who could treat 
their personal history so impartially as a means of conveying les- 
sons of general truth ; or who, while chronicling such small things, 
could remain so great. The Prelude is a book of good augury 
for human nature. We feel in reading it as if the stock of man- 
kind were sound. The soul seems going on from strength to 
strength by the mere development of her inborn power. And the 
scene with which the poem at once opens and concludes — the re- 
turn to the Lake country as to a permanent and satisfying home — 
places the poet at last amid his true surroundings, and leaves us 
to contemplate him as completed by a harmony without him, 
which he of all men most needed to evoke the harmony within. 



WORDSWORTH. 3* 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE ENGLISH LAKES. 

The lakes and mountains of Cumberland, Westmoreland, and 
Lancashire are singularly fitted to supply such elements of moral 
sustenance as nature's aspects can afford to man. There are, in- 
deed, many mountain regions of greater awfulness ; but prospects 
of ice and terror should be a rare stimulant rather than an habitual 
food; and the physical difficulties inseparable from immense ele- 
vations depress the inhabitant and preoccupy the traveller. There 
are many lakes under a more lustrous sky : but the healthy activ- 
ities of life demand a scene brilliant without languor, and a beauty 
which can refresh and satisfy rather than lull or overpower. 
Without advancing any untenable claim to British pre-eminence in 
the matter of scenery, we may, perhaps, follow on both these points 
the judgment which Wordsworth has expressed in his Guide to the 
Lakes, a work which condenses the results of many years of inti- 
mate observation. 

" Our tracts of wood and water," he says, " are almost diminu- 
tive in comparison (with Switzerland); therefore, as far as sublim- 
ity is dependent upon absolute bulk and height, and atmospherical 
influences in connexion with these, it is obvious that there can be 
no rivalship. But a short residence among the British mountains 
will furnish abundant proof that, after a certain point of elevation, 
viz., that which allows of compact and fleecy clouds settling upon, 
or sweeping over, the summits, the sense of sublimity depends 
more upon form and relation of objects to each other than upon 
their actual magnitude ; and that an elevation of 3000 feet is suffi- 
cient to call forth in a most impressive degree the creative, and 
magnifying, and softening powers of the atmosphere." 

And again, as to climate : " The rain," he says, " here comes 
down heartily, and is frequently succeeded by clear bright weather, 
when every brook is vocal, and every torrent sonorous ; brooks 
and torrents which are never muddy even in the heaviest floods. 
Days of unsettled weather, with partial showers, are very frequent ; 
but the showers, darkening or brightening as they fly from hill to 
hill, are not less grateful to the eye than finely interwoven pass- 
ages of gay and sad music are touching to the ear. Vapours, ex- 
haling from the lakes and meadows after sunrise in a hot season- 
or in moist weather brooding upon the heights, or descending tow 



. 2 WORDS IVOR TIL 

ards the valleys with inaudible motion, give a visionary character 
to everything around them; and are in themselves so beautiful as 
to dispose us to enter into the feelings of those simple nations 
(such as the Laplanders of this day) by whom they are taken for 
guardian deities of the mountains ; or to sympathise with others 
who have fancied these delicate apparitions to be the spirits of 
their departed ancestors. Akin to these are fleecy clouds resting 
upon the hill-tops ; they are not easily managed in picture, with 
their accompaniments of blue sky, but how glorious are they in 
nature! how pregnant with imagination for the poet! And th? 
height of the Cumbrian mountains is sufficient to exhibit daily ana 
hourly instances of those mysterious attachments. Such clouds, 
cleaving to their stations, or lifting up suddenly their glittering 
heads from behind rocky barriers, or hurrying out of sight with 
speed of the sharpest edge, will often tempt an inhabitant to con- 
gratulate himself on belonging to a country of mists and clouds 
and storms, and make him think of the blank sky of Egypt, and of 
the cerulean vacancy of Italy, as an unanimated and even a sad 
spectacle." 

The consciousness of a preceding turmoil brings home to us 
best the sense of perfect peace ; and a climate accustomed to 
storm-cloud and tempest can melt sometimes into "a day as still 
as heaven," with a benignant tranquillity which calmer regions can 
scarcely know. Such a day Wordsworth has described in language 
of such delicate truth and beauty as only a long and intimate love 
can inspire : 

" It has been said that in human life there are moments worth ages. 
In a more subdued tone of sympathy may we affirm, that in the climate 
of England there are, for the lover of nature, days which are worth whole 
months, I might say, even years. One of these favoured days sometimes 
occurs in spring-time, when that soft air is breathing over the blossoms 
and new-born verdure which inspired Buchanan with his beautiful Ode to 
the First of May ; the air which, in the luxuriance of his fancy, he likens 
to that of the golden age — to that which gives motion to the funereal 
cypresses on the banks of Lethe ; to the air which is to salute beatified 
spirits when expiatory fires shall have consumed the earth with all her 
habitations. But it is in autumn that days of such affecting influence 
most frequently intervene. The atmosphere seems refined, and the sky 
rendered more crystalline, as the vivifying heat of the year abates ; the 
lights and shadows are more delicate; the colouring is richer and more 
finely harmonised ; and, in this season of stillness, the ear being unoccu- 
pied, or only gently excited, the sense of vision becomes more susceptible 
of its appropriate enjoyments. A resident in a country like this which 
we are treating of will agree with me that the presence of a lake is in- 
dispensable to exhibit in perfection the beauty of one of these days ; and 
he must have experienced, while looking on the unruffled waters, that the 
imagination by their aid is carried into recesses of feeling otherwise im- 
penetrable. The reason of this is, that the heavens are not only brought 
down into the bosom of the earth, but that the earth is mainly looked at, 
and thought of, through the medium of a purer element. The happiest 
time is when the equinoctial gales are departed ; but their fury may prob- 
ably be called to mind by the sight of a few shattered boughs, whose 



WORDSWORTH. 



33 



leaves do not differ in colour from the faded foliage of the stately oaks 
from which these relics of the storm depend: all else speaks of tranquil- 
lity ; not a breath of air, no restlessness of insects, and not a moving ob- 
ject perceptible — except the clouds gliding in the depths of the lake, or 
the traveller passing along, an inverted image, whose motion seems gov- 
erned by the quiet of a time to which its archetype, the living person, is 
perhaps' insensible ; or it may happen that the figure of one of the larger 
birds, a raven or a heron, is crossing silently among the reflected clouds, 
while the voice of the real bird, from the element aloft, gently awakens in 
the spectator the recollection of appetites and instincts, pursuits and oc- 
cupations, that deform and agitate the world, yet have no power to pre- 
vent nature from putting on an aspect capable of satisfying the most in- 
tense cravings for the tranquil, the lovely, and the perfect to which man, 
the noblest of her creatures, is subject. " 

The scene described here is one as exquisite in detail as majestic 
in general effect. And it is characteristic of the region in which 
Wordsworth's love was given that there is no corner of it without 
a meaning and a charm ; that the open record of its immemorial 
past tells us at every turn that all agencies have conspired for 
loveliness and ruin itself has been benign. A passage of Words- 
worth's describing the character of the lake-shores illustrates this 
fact with loving minuteness : 

" Sublimity is the result of nature's first great dealings with the super- 
ficies of the Earth ; but the general tendency of her subsequent operations 
is towards the production of beauty, by a multiplicity of symmetrical parts 
uniting in a consistent whole. This is everywhere exemplified along the 
margins of these lakes. Masses of rock, that have been precipitated from 
the heights into the area of waters, lie in some places like stranded ships, 
or have acquired the compact structure of jutting piers, or project in little 
peninsulas crested with native wood. The smallest rivulet, one whose silent 
influx is scarcely noticeable in a season of dry weather, so faint is the dimple 
made by it on the smooth surface of the lake, will be found to have been 
not useless in shaping, by its deposits of gravel and soil in time of flood, a 
curve that would not otherwise have existed. But the more powerful 
brooks, encroaching upon the level of the lake, have, in course of time, 
given birth to ample promontories of sweeping outline, that contrast boldly 
with the longitudinal base of the steeps on the opposite shore ; while their 
flat or gently-sloping surfaces never fail to introduce, into the midst of 
desolation and barrenness, the elements of fertility, even where the habi- 
tations of men may not have been raised." 

With this we may contrast, as a companion picture, the poet's 
description of the tarns, or lonely bodies of water, which lie here 
and there among the hills : 

" They are difficult of access and naked ; yet some of them are, in their 
permanent forms, very grand, and there are accidents of things which 
would make the meanest of them interesting. At all events, one of these 
pools is an acceptable sight to the mountain wanderer, not merely as an 
incident that diversifies the prospect, but as forming in his mind a centre 
or conspicuous point to which objects, otherwise disconnected or insubor- 
dinated, may be referred. Some few have a varied outline, with bold 



3 4 WORDS IVOR TH. 

heath-clad promontories ; and as they mostly lie at the foot of a steep 
precipice, the water, where the sun is not shining upon it, appears black 
and sullen, and round the margin huge stones and masses of rock are 
scattered, some defying conjecture as to the means by which they came 
thither, and others obviously fallen from on high, the contribution of ages. 
A not unpleasing sadness is induced by this perplexity and these images 
of decay ; while the prospect of a body of pure water, unattended with 
groves and other cheerful rural images by which fresh water is usually ac- 
companied, and unable to give furtherance to the meagre vegetation around 
it, excites a sense of some repulsive power strongly put forth, and thus 
deepens the melancholy natural to such scenes." 

To those who love to deduce the character of a population from 
the character of their race and surroundings the peasantry of Cum- 
berland and Westmoreland form an attractive theme. Drawn in 
great part from the strong Scandinavian stock, they dwell in aland 
solemn and beautiful as Norway itself, but without Norway's rigour 
and penury, and with still lakes and happy rivers instead of Nor- 
way's inarming melancholy sea. They are a mountain folk ; but 
their mountains are no precipices of insuperable snow, such as 
keep the dwellers in some Swiss hamlet shut in ignorance and 
stagnating into idiocy. These barriers divide only to concentrate, 
and environ only to endear ; their guardianship is but enough to 
give an added unity to each group of kindred homes. And thus it 
is that the Cumbrian dalesmen have afforded perhaps as near a 
realisation as human facts have yet allowed of the rural society 
which statesmen desire for their country's greatness. They have 
given an example of substantial comfort strenuously won: of home 
affections intensified by independent strength ; of isolation without 
ignorance, and of a shrewd simplicity; of an hereditary virtue 
which needs no support from fanaticism, and to which honour is 
more than law. 

The school of political economists, moreover, who urge the ad- 
vantage of a peasant proprietary, of small independent holdings — 
as at once drawing from the land the fullest produce and rearing 
upon it the most vigorous and provident population — this school, 
as is well known, finds in the statesmen of Cumberland one of its 
favourite examples. In the days of border-wars, when the first ob- 
ject was to secure the existence of as many armed men as possible, 
in readiness to repel the Scot, the abbeys and great proprietors in 
the north readily granted small estates on military tenure, which 
tenure, when personal service in the field was no longer needed, 
became in most cases an absolute ownership. The attachment of 
these statesmen to their hereditary estates, the heroic efforts which 
they would make to avoid parting with them, formed an impressive 
phenomenon in the little world — a world at once of equality and of 
conservatism — which was the scene of Wordsworth's childish years, 
and which remained his manhood's ideal. 

The growth of large fortunes in England, and the increased 
competition for land, has swallowed up many of these small inde- 
pendent holdings in the extensive properties of wealthy men. And 



WORDSWORTH. ,r 

at the same time the spread of education, and the improved poor- 
laws and other legislation, by raising the condition of other parts 
of England, have tended to obliterate the contrast which was so 
marked in Wordsworth's day. How marked that contrast was, a 
comparison of Crabbe's poems with Wordsworth's will sufficiently 
indicate. Both are true painters ; but while in the one we see 
poverty as something gross and degrading, and the Tales of the 
Village stand out from a background of pauperism and crime ; in 
the other picture poverty means nothing worse than privation, and 
the poet in the presence of the most tragic outcast of fortune could 
still 

" Have laughed himself to scorn to find 
In that decrepit man so firm a mind." 

Nay, even when a state far below the Leech-Gatherer 's has been 
reached, and mind and body alike are in their last decay, the 
life of the Old Cumberla?id Beggar, at one remove from nothing- 
ness, has yet a dignity and a usefulness of its own. His fading 
days are passed in no sad asylum of vicious or gloomy age, but 
amid neighbourly kindnesses, and in the sanity of the open air; 
and a life that is reduced to its barest elements has yet a hold on 
the liberality of nature and the affections of human hearts. 

So long as the inhabitants of a region so solitary and beautiful 
have neither many arts nor many wishes, save such as the nature 
which they know has suggested, and their own handiwork can 
satisfy, so long are their presence and habitations likely to be in 
harmony with the scenes around them. Nay, man's presence is 
almost always needed to draw out the full meaning of Nature, to 
illustrate her bounty by his glad well-being, and to hint by his con- 
trivances of precaution at her might and terror. Wordsworth's 
description of the cottages of Cumberland depicts this unconscious 
adaptation of man's abode to his surroundings, with an eye which 
may be called at pleasure that of painter or of poet. 

" The dwelling-houses and contiguous out-houses are in many instances 
of the colour of the native rock out of which they have been built ; but 
frequently the dwelling— or Fire-house, as it is ordinarilv called— has been 
distinguished from the barn or byre by roughcast and whitewash, which, as 
the inhabitants are not hasty in renewing it, in a few years acquires by 
the influence of weather a tint at once sober and variegated. As these 
houses have been, from father to son, inhabited by persons engaged in the 
same occupations, yet necessarily with changes in their circumstances, 
they have received without incongruity additions and accommodations 
adapted to the needs of each successive occupant, who being for the most 
part proprietor, was at liberty to follow his own fancy, so that these hum- 
ble dwellings remind the contemplative spectator' of a production of 
nature, and may (using a strong expression) rather be said to have grown 
than to have been erected — to have risen, by an instinct of their own, out 
of the native rock— so little is there in them of formality, such is their 
wildness and beauty. 

" These dwellings, mostly built, as has been said, of rough unhewn 
stone, are roofed with slates, which were rudely taken from the quarrv 



3 6 WORDSWORTH. 

before the present art of splitting them was understood, and are therefore 
rough and uneven in their surface, so that both the coverings and sides of 
the houses have furnished places of rest for the seeds of lichens, mosses, 
ferns, and flowers. Hence buildings, which in their very form call to mind 
the processes of nature, do thus, clothed in part with a vegetable garb, ap- 
pear to be received into the bosom of the living principle of things, as it 
acts and exists among the woods and fields, and by their colour and their 
shape affectingly direct the thoughts to that /ranquil course of nature and 
simplicity along which the humble-minded inhabitants have through so 
many generations been led. Add the little garden with its shed for bee- 
hives, its small bed of potherbs, and its borders and patches of flowers for 
Sunday posies, with sometimes a choice few too much prized to be plucked ; 
an orchard of proportioned size ; a cheese-press, often supported by some 
tree near the door; a cluster of embowering sycamores for summer shade, 
with a tall fir through which the winds sing when other trees are leafless ; 
the little rill or household spout murmuring in all seasons : combine these 
incidents and images together, and you have the representative idea of a 
mountain cottage in this country — so beautifully formed in itself, and so 
richly adorned by the hand of Nature." 

These brief descriptions may suffice to indicate the general 
character of a district which in Wordsworth's early days had a dis- 
tinctive unity which he was the first fully to appreciate, which was 
at its best during his long lifetime, and which has already begun 
to disappear. The mountains had waited long for a full adoration, 
an intelligent worship. At last "they were enough beloved." 
And if now the changes wrought around them recall too often the 
poet's warning, how 

" All that now delights thee, from the day 
On which it should be touched, shall melt, and melt away — " 

yet they have gained something which cannot be taken from them. 
Not mines, nor railways, nor monster excursions, nor reservoirs, nor 
Manchester herself, " toute entiere a sa proie attachee," can deprive 
lake and hill of Wordsworth's memory, and the love which once they 
knew. 

Wordsworth's life was from the very first so ordered as to <nve 
him the most complete and intimate knowledge both of district*and 
people. _ There was scarcely a mile of ground in the Lake country 
over which he had not wandered ; scarcely a prospect which was 
not linked with his life by some tie of memory. Born at Cocker- 
mouth, on the outskirts o'f the district his mind was gradually led 
on to its beauty; and his first recollections were of Derwent's 
grassy holms and rocky falls, with Skiddaw, "bronzed with deepest 
radiance,'' towering in the eastern sky. Sent to school at Hawks- 
head at eight years old, Wordsworth's scene was transferred to the 
other extremity of the Lake district. It was in this quaint old 
town, on the banks of Esthwaite Water, that the " fair seed-time 
of his soul " was passed ; it was here that his boyish delight in ex- 
ercise and adventure grew, and melted in its turn into a more im- 
personal yearning, a deeper absorption into thebeautv and the won- 
der of the world. And even the records of his boyish amusements 



WORDSWORTH. 37 

come to us each on a background of nature's majesty and calm. 
Setting springs for woodcock on the grassy moors at night, at nine 
years old, he feels himself "' a trouble to the peace " that dwells 
among the moon and stars overhead ; and when he has appropriated 
a woodcock caught by somebody else, " sounds of undistinguishable 
motion " embody the viewless pursuit of Nemesis among the soli- 
tary hills. In the perilous search for the raven's nest, as he hangs 
on the face of the naked crags of Yewdale, he feels for the first 
time that sense of detachment from external things which a position 
of strange unreality will often force on the mind. 

" Oh, at that time 
vVhen on the perilous ridge I hung alone, 
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind 
Blow through my ear ! the sky seemed not a sky 
Of earth — and with what motion moved the clouds ! " 
The innocent rapine of nutting taught him to feel that there is a 
spirit in the woods — a presence which too rude a touch of ours will 
desecrate and destroy. 

The neighbouring lakes of Coniston, Esthwaite, Windermere, 
have left similar traces of the gradual upbuilding of his spirit. It 
was on a promontory on Coniston that the sun's last rays, gilding 
the eastern hills above which he had first appeared, suggested the 
boy's first impulse of spontaneous poetry, in the resolve that, wher- 
ever life should lead him, his last thoughts should fall on the scenes 
where his childhood was passing now. It vis on Esthwaite that 
the " huge peak " of Wetherlam, following L'm (as it seemed) as 
he rowed across the starlit water, suggested the dim conception of 
"unknown modes of being," and a life that is not ours. It was 
round Esthwaite that the boy used to wander with a friend at early 
dawn, rejoicing in the charm of words in tuneful order, and repeat- 
ing together their favourite verses, till " sounds of exultation echoed 
through the groves." It was on Esthwaite that the band of skaters 
" hiss'ed along the polished ice in games confederate," from 
which Wordsworth would sometimes withdraw himself and pause 
suddenly in full career, to feel in that dizzy silence the mystery of 
a rolling world. 

A passage, less frequently quoted, in describing a boating ex- 
cursion on Windermere illustrates the effect of some small point of 
human interest in concentrating and realising the diffused emotion 
which radiates from a scene of beauty : 

" But, ere nightfall, 
When in our pinnace we returned at leisure 
Over the shadowy lake, and to the beach 
Of some small island steered our course with one, 
The minstrel of the troop, and left him there, 
And rowed off gently, while he blew his flute 
Alone upon the rock — oh, then the calm 
And dead still water lay upon my mind 
Even with a weight of pleasure, and the sky, 
Never before so beautiful, sank down 
Into my heart, and held me like a dream I " 



38 



WORDSWORTH. 



The passage which describes the school-boy's call to the owls — 
the lines of which Coleridge said that he should have exclaimed 
" Wordsworth ! " if he had met them running wild in the deserts 
of Arabia — paints a somewhat similar rush of feeling with a still 
deeper charm. The " gentle shock of mild surprise " which in the 
pauses of the birds' jocund din car?'ies far into his heart the sound 
of mountain torrents — the very mingling of the grotesque and the 
majestic — brings home the contrast between our transitory ener- 
gies and the mystery around us which returns ever the same to the 
moments when we pause and are at peace. 

It is round the two small lakes of Grasmere and Rydal that the 
memories of Wordsworth are most thickly clustered. On one or 
other of these lakes he lived for fifty years — the first half of the 
present century ; and there is not in all that region a hill-side walk 
or winding valley which has not heard him murmuring out his verses 
as they slowly rose from his heart. The cottage at Townend, Gras- 
mere, where he first settled, is now surrounded by the out-buildings 
of a busy hotel, and the noisy stream of traffic, and the sight of the 
many villas which spot the valley, give a new pathos to the sonnet 
in which Wordsworth deplores the alteration which even his own 
residence might make in the simplicity of the lonely scene : 

" Well may'st thou halt, and gaze with brightening eye ! 
The lovely cottage in the guardian nook 
Hath stirred thee deeply ; with its own dear brook- 
Its own small pasture, almost its own sky ! 
But covet not the abode : forbear to sigh, 
As many do, repining while they look ; 
Intruders — who would tear from Nature's boo*. 
This precious leaf with harsh impiety. 
Think what the home must be if it were thine, 
Even thine, though few thy wants ! Roof, wind 
The very flowers are sacred to the poor, 
The roses to the porch which they entwine : 
Yea, all that now enchants thee, from the day 
On which it should be touched, would melt, and melt away." 

The Poems on the Naming of Places belong for the most part 
to this neighbourhood. Emma's Dell on Easdale Beck, Point 
Rash- Judgment on the eastern shore of Grasmere, Mary's Pool in 
Rydal Park, William 's Peak on Stone Arthur, Joanna's Rock 
on the banks of Rotha, and John's Grove near White Moss Com- 
mon, have been identified by the loving search of those to whom 
every memorial of that simple-hearted family group has still a 
charm. 

It is on Greenhead Ghyll — " upon the forest-side in Grasmere 
Vale " — that the poet has laid the scene of Michael, the poem which 
paints with such detailed fidelity both the inner and the outward life 
of a typical West moreland " statesman." And the upper road from 
Grasmere to Rydal, superseded now by the road along the lake- 
side, and left as a winding foot-path among rock and fern, was 
one of his most habitual haunts. Of another such haunt his 



WORDSWORTH. 3g 

friend Lady Richardson says, " The Prelude was chiefly composed 
in a green mountain terrace, on the Easdale side of Helm Crag, 
known by the name of Under Lancrigg, a place which he used to 
say he knew by heart. The ladies sat at their work on the hill-side 
while he walked to and fro on the smooth green mountain turf, 
humming out his verses to himself, and then repeating them to his 
sympathising and ready scribes, to be noted down on the spot and 
transcribed at home." 

The neighbourhood of the poet's later home at Rydal Mount is 
equally full of associations. Two of the Evening Voluntaries 
were composed by the side of Rydal Mere. The Wild Dicck's A T cst 
was on one of the Rydal islands. It was on the fells of Loughri'o-o- 
that the poet's fancy loved to plant an imperial castle. And 
WansfelPs green slope still answers with many a change of glow 
and shadow to the radiance of the sinking sun. 

Hawkshead and Rydal, then, may be considered as the poet's 
principal centres, and the scenery in their neighbourhood has 
received his most frequent attention. The Duddon, a seldom- 
visited stream on the south-west border of the Lake district, has 
been traced by him from source to outfall in a series of sonnets. 
Langdale, and Little Langdale, with Blea Tarn lying in it, form the 
principal scene of the discourses in the Exctirsion. The more dis- 
tant lakes and mountains were often visited, and are often alluded 
to. The scene of The Brothers, for example, is laid in Ennerdale ; 
and the index of the minor poems will supply other instances. But 
it is chiefly round two lines of road leading from Grasmere that 
Wordsworth's associations cluster — the route over Dunmailraise, 
which led him to Keswick, to Coleridge and Southey at Greta Hall) 
and to other friends in that neighbourhood ; and the route over 
Kirkstone, which led him to Ullswater, and the friendly houses of 
Patterdale, Hallsteads, and Lowther Castle. The first of these two 
routes was that over which the Waggoner plied ; it skirts the lovely 
shore of Thirlmere— a lonely sheet of water, of exquisite irregular- 
ity of outline, and fringed with delicate verdure, which the Corpora- 
tion of Manchester has lately bought to embank it into a reservoir. 
Dedecorum pretiosus emptor/ This lake was a favorite haunt of 
Wordsworth's ; and upon a rock on its margin, where he and Cole- 
ridge, coming from Keswick and Grasmere, would often meet, the 
two poets, with the other members of Wordsworth's loving house- 
hold group, inscribed the initial letters of their names. To the 
;' monumental power " of this Rock of Names Wordsworth appeals, 
m lines written when the happy company who engraved them had 
already been severed by distance and death : 

11 O thought of pain, 
That would impair it or profane ! 
And fail not Thou, loved Rock, to keep 
Thy charge when we are laid asleep." 

The rock may still be seen, but is to be submerged in the ne\t 
reservoir. In the vale of Keswick itself, Applethwaite, Skiddaw, 



40 WORDSWORTH. 

St. Herbert's Island, Lodore, are commemorated in sonnets or 
inscriptions. And the Borrowdale yew-trees have inspired some of 
the poet's noblest lines — lines breathing all the strange forlornness 
of Glaramara's solitude, and the withering vault of shade. 

The route from Rydal to Ullswater is still more thickly studded 
with poetic allusions. The Pass of Kirkstone is the theme of a 
characteristic ode ; Grisdale Tarn and Helvellyn recur again and 
again ; and Aira Force was one of the spots which the poet best loved 
to describe as well as to visit. It was on the shores of Further 
Gowbarrow that the Daffodils danced beneath the trees. These 
references might be much further multiplied ; and the loving dili- 
gence of disciples has set before us " the Lake district as inter- 
preted by Wordsworth " through a multitude of details. But 
enough has been said to show how completely the poet had absorbed 
the influences of his dwelling-places ; how unique a representative 
he had become of the lovely district of his birth ; how he had made 
it subject to him by comprehending it, and his own by love. 

He visited other countries and described other scenes. Scot- 
land, Wales, Switzerland, France, Germany, Italy, have all a place 
in his works. His familiarity with other scenery helped him, 
doubtless, to a better appreciation of the Lake country than he 
could have gained had he never left it. And, on the other hand, 
like Caesar in Gaul, or Wellington in the Peninsular, it was be- 
cause he had so complete a grasp of this chosen base of operations 
that he was able to come, to see, and to make his own, so swiftly 
and unfailingly elsewhere. Happy are those whose deep-rooted 
memories cling like his about some stable home ! whose notion of 
the world around them has expanded from some prospect of happy 
tranquillity, instead of being drawn at random from the confusing 
city's roar ! Happier still if that early picture be of one of those 
rare scenes which have inspired poets and prophets with the ret- 
rospective day-dream of a patriarchal, or a golden age ; of some 
plot of ground like the Ithaca of Odysseus, rprjysl\ aXX aAaOrj 
rouefh, but a nurse of men: " of some life like that 



xouporpocfoc, 

which a poet of kindred spirit to Wordsworth's saw half in vision 

half in reality, among the husbandmen of the Italian hills : 

" Peace, peace is theirs, and life no fraud that knows, 
Wealth as they will, and when they will, repose : 
On many a hill the happy homesteads stand, 
The living lakes through many a vale expand ; 
Cool glens are there, and shadowy caves divine, 
Deep sleep, and far-off voices of the kine — 
From moor to moor the exulting wild deer stray; 
The strenuous youth are strong and sound as they ; 
One reverence still the untainted race inspires, 
God their first thought, and after God their sires ; — 
These last discerned Astraea's flying hem, 
And Virtue's latest footsteps walked with them." 



WORDS WOR TH. 4 x 



CHAPTER V. 

MARRIAGE. — SOCIETY. — HIGHLAND TOUR. 

With Wordsworth's settlement at Townend, Grasmere, in the 
closing days of the last century, the external events of his life may 
be said to come to an end. Even his marriage to Miss Mary 
Hutchinson, of Penrith, on October 4, 1802, was not so much an 
importation into his existence of new emotion, as a development 
and intensification of feelings which had long been there. This 
marriage was the crowning stroke of Wordsworth's felicity — the 
poetic recompense for his steady advocacy of all simple and noble 
things. When he wished to illustrate the true dignity and delicacy 
of rustic lives he was always accustomed to refer to the Cumbrian 
folk. And now it seemed that Cumberland requited him for his 
praises with her choicest boon; found for him in the country town 
of Penrith, and from the small and obscure circle of his connex- 
ions and acquaintance — nay, from the same dame's school in 
which he was taught to read — a wife such as neither rank nor young 
beauty nor glowing genius enabled his brother bards to win. 

Mrs. Wordsworth's poetic appreciativeness, manifest to all who 
knew her, is attested by the poet's assertion that two of the best 
lines in the poem of The Daffodils — 

"They flash upon that inward eye 
Which is the bliss of solitude " — 

were of her composition. And in all other matters, from the 
highest to the lowest, she was to him a true helpmate, a companion 
"dearer far than life and light are dear,'' and able " in his steep 
march to uphold him to the end." Devoted to her husband, she 
nevertheless welcomed not only without jealousy but with delight 
the household companionship through life of the sister who formed 
so large an element in his being. Admiring the poet's genius to 
the full, and following the workings of his mind with a sympathy 
that never tired, she nevertheless was able to discern, and with 
unobtrusive care to hide or avert, those errors of manner into 
which retirement and self-absorption will betray even the gentlest 
spirit. It speaks, perhaps, equally well for Wordsworth's character 
that this tendency to a lengthy insistence, in general conversation, 
on his own feelings and ideas is the worst charge that can be 



42 



WORDSWORTH. 



brought against him ; and for Mrs. Wordsworth's, that her simple 
and rustic upbringing had gifted her with a manner so gracious 
and a tact so ready that in her presence all things could not but go 
well. 

The life which the young couple led was one of primitive sim- 
plicity. In some respects it was even less luxurious than that of 
the peasants around them. They drank water, and ate the simplest 
fare. Miss Wordsworth had long rendered existence possible for 
her brother on the narrowest of means by her unselfish energy 
and skill in household management; and '"plain living and high 
thinking " were equally congenial to the new inmate of the frugal 
home. Wordsworth gardened; and all together, or oftenest the 
poet and his sister, wandered almost daily over the neighbour- 
ing hills. Narrow means did not prevent them from offering a 
generous welcome to their few friends, especially Coleridge and his 
family, who repeatedly stayed for months under Wordsworth's roof. 
Miss Wordsworth's unpublished letters breathe the very spirit of 
ho pitality in their naive details of the little sacrifices gladly made 
for the sake of the presence of these honoured guests. But for the 
most part their life was solitary and uneventful. Books they had 
few; neighbours almost none ; and Miss Wordsworth's diary of 
these early years describes a life seldom paralleled in its intimate 
dependence on external nature. I take, almost at random, her 
account of a single day. "November 24, 1801. Read Chaucer. 
We walked by Gell's cottage. As we were going along we were 
stopped at once, at the distance, perhaps, of fifty yards from our 
favourite birch-tree; it was yielding to the gust of wind, with all its 
tender twigs ; the sun shone upon it, and'it glanced in the wind 
like a flying sunshiny shower. It was a tree in shape, with stem 
and branches ; but it was like a spirit of water. After our return 
William read Spenser to us, and then walked to John's Grove. Went 
to meet W." And from an unpublished letter of Miss Words- 
worth's, of about the same period (September 10, 1800), I extract 
her description of the new home. "We are daily more delighted 
with Grasmere and its neighbourhood. Our walks are perpetually 
varied, and we are more fond of the mountains as our acquaintance 
with them increases. We have a boat upon the lake, and a small 
orchard and smaller garden, which, as it is the work of our own 
hands, we regard with pride and partiality. Our cottage is quite 
large enough for us, though very small ; and we have made it neat 
and comfortable within doors ; and it looks very nice on the out- 
side ; for though the roses and honeysuckles which we have 
planted against it are only of this year's growth, yet it is covered all 
over with green leaves and scarlet flowers ; for we have trained 
scarlet beans upon threads, which are not only exceedingly beauti- 
ful but very useful, as their produce is immense. We have made 
a lodging-room of the parlour below stairs, which has a stone floor, 
therefore we have covered it all over with matting. We sit in a 
room above stairs, and we have one lodging-room with two single 
beds, a sort of lumber-room, and a small, low, unceiled room, which 



WORDS I VOR TH. 43 

I have papered with newspapers, and in which we have put a 
small bed. Our servant is an old woman of sixty years of age, 
whom we took partly out of charity. She was very ignorant, very 
foolish, and very difficult to teach. But the goodness of her dis- 
position, and the great convenience we should find if my persever- 
ance was successful, induced me to go on." 

The sonnets entitled Personal Talk give a vivid picture of the 
blessings of such seclusion. There are many minds which will 
echo the exclamation with which the poet dismisses his visitors 
and their gossip : 

" Better than such discourse doth silence long, 
Long barren silence, square with my desire ; 
To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, 
In the loved presence of my cottage fire, 
And listen to the flapping of the flame, 
Or kettle whispering its faint undersong." 

Many will look with envy on a life which has thus decisively 
cut itself loose from the world ; which is secure from the influx of 
those preoccupations, at once distracting and nugatory, which 
deaden the mind to all other stimulus, and split the river of life 
into channels so minute that it loses itself in the sand. 

" Hence have I genial seasons ; hence have I 
Smooth passions, smooth discourse, and joyous thought. 

Left to herself, the mind can expatiate in those kingdoms of the 
spirit bequeathed to us by past generations and distant men, which 
to the idle are but a garden of idleness, but to those who choose 
it become a true possession and an ever-widening home. Among 
those "nobler loves and nobler cares" there is excitement without 
reaction, there is an unwearied and impersonal joy — a joy which 
can only be held cheap because it is so abundant, and can only 
disappoint us through our own incapacity to contain it. These 
delights of study and of solitude Wordsworth enjoyed to the full. 
In no other poet, perhaps, have the poet's heightened sensibilities 
been productive of a pleasure so unmixed with pain. The wind of 
his emotions blew right abaft; he "swam smoothly in the stream 
of his nature, and lived but one man." 

The blessing of meditative and lonely hours must of course be 
purchased by corresponding limitations. Wordsworth's concep- 
tion of human character retained to the end an extreme simplicity. 
Many of life's most impressive phenomena were hid from his eyes. 
He never encountered any of those rare figures whose aspect 
seems to justify all traditions of pomp and pre-eminence when they 
appear amid stately scenes as with a natural sovereignty. He nei- 
ther achieved nor underwent any of those experiences which can 
make all high romance seem a part of memory, and bestow, as it 
were, a password and introduction into the very innermost of hu- 
man fates. On the other hand, he almost wholly escaped those 
sufferings which exceptional natures must needs derive from too 



44 



WOK DS IVOR TH. 



close a contact with this commonplace world. It was not his lot — as 
it has been the lot of so many poets — to move amongst mankind 
at once as an intimate and a stranger ; to travel from disillusion- 
ment to disillusionment, and from regret to regret ; to construct 
around him a world of ideal beings, who crumble into dust at his 
couch ; to hope from them what they can neither understand nor 
accomplish, to lavish on them what they can never repay. Such 
pain, indeed, may become a discipline ; and the close contact with 
many lives may teach to the poetic nature lessons of courage, of 
self-suppression, of resolute good-will, and may transform into an 
added dignity the tumult of emotions which might else have run 
riot in his heart. Yet it is less often from moods of self-control 
than from moods of self-abandonment that the fount of poetry 
springs ; and herein it was that Wordsworth's especial felicity lay 
— that there was no one feeling in him which the world had either 
repressed or tainted ; that he had no joy which might not be the 
harmless joy of all ; and that, therefore, it was when he was most 
unreservedly himself that he was most profoundly human. All 
that was needful for him was to strike down into the deep of his 
heart. Or, using his own words, we may compare his tranquil ex- 
istence to 

" A crystal river, 
Diaphanous because it travels slowly ; " 

and in which poetic thoughts rose unimpeded to the surface, like 
bubbles through the pellucid stream. 

The first hint of many of his briefer poems is to be found in his 

sister's diary : 

"April 15, 1802.— When we were in the woods below Gowbarrow 
Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. As we went along 
there were more., and yet more ; and at last, under the boughs of the trees, 
we saw there was a long belt of them along the shore. I never saw daf- 
fodils so beautiful. They grew among the mossy stones about them ; 
some rested their heads on the stones as on a pillow ; the rest tossed, and 
reeled, and danced, and seemed as if they verily danced with the wind, 
they looked so gay and glancing." 

"July 30, 1802.— Left London between five and six o'clock of the 
morning, outside the Dover coach. A beautiful morning. The city, St 
Paul's, with the river, a multitude of little boats, made a beautiful sight as 
we crossed Westminster Bridge; the houses not overhung by their clouds 
of smoke, were spread out endlessly ; yet the sun shone so brightly, with 
such a pure light, that there was something like the purity of one of 
nature's own grand spectacles. Arrived at Calais at four in the morning 
of July 31st. Delightful walks in the evenings, seeing far off in the west 
the coast of England like a cloud, crested with Dover Castle, the evening 
star, and the glory of the sky. The reflections in the water were more 
beautiful than the sky itself; purple waves brighter than precious stones 
for ever melting away upon the sands." 

How simple are the elements of these delights ! There is 
nothing here, except fraternal affection, a sunrise, a sunset, a flock 



WORDS WOR TH. 45 

of bright wild flowers ; and yet the sonnets on }Vestminster Bridge 
and Calais Sands, and the stanzas on the Daffodils, have taken 
their place among the permanent records of the profoundest human 
joy. 

Another tour — this time through Scotland — undertaken in 
August, 1803, inspired Wordsworth with several of his best pieces. 
Miss Wordsworth's diary of this tour has been lately published, 
iid should be familiar to all lovers of nature. The sister's journal 
is, indeed, the best introduction to the brother's poems. It has 
not — it cannot have — their dignity and beauty ; but it exemplifies 
the same method of regarding Nature, the same self-identification 
with her subtler aspects and entrance into her profounder charm. 
It is interesting to notice how the same impression strikes both 
minds at once. From the sister's it is quickly reflected in words 
of exquisite delicacy and simplicity ; in the brother's it germinates, 
and reappears, it may be months or years afterwards, as the 
nucleus of a mass of thought and feeling which has grown round 
it in his musing soul. The travellers' encounter with two High- 
land girls on the shore of Loch Lomond is a good instance of this. 
"One of the girls," writes Miss Wordsworth, " was exceedingly 
beautiful ; and the figures of both of them, in gray plaids falling 
to their feet, their faces only being uncovered, excited our attention 
before we spoke to them ; but they answered us so sweetly that 
we were quite delighted, at the same time that they stared at us 
with an innocent look of wonder. I think I never heard the Eng- 
lish language sound more sweetly than from the mouth of the elder 
of these girls, while she stood at the gate answering our inquiries, 
her face flushed with the rain ; her pronunciation was clear and 
distinct, without difficulty, yet slow, as if like a foreign speech." 

" A face with gladness overspread ! 
Soft smiles, by human kindness bred! 
And seemliness complete, that sways 
Thy courtesies, about thee plays ; 
With no restraint, but such as springs 
From quick and eager visitings 
Of thoughts that lie beyond the reach 
Of thy few words of English speech : 
A bondage sweetly brooked, a strife 
That gives thy gestures grace and life ! 
So have I, not unmoved in mind, 
Seen birds of tempest-loving kind 
Thus beating up against the wind." 

The travellers saw more of this girl, and Miss Wordsworth's 
opinion was confirmed. But to Wordsworth his glimpse of her 
became a veritable romance. He commemorated it in his poem of 
The Highland Girl, soon after his return from Scotland ; he nar- 
rated it once more in his poem of The Three Cottage Girls, written 
nearly twenty years afterwards; and "the sort of prophecy," he 
says in 1843, "with which the verses conclude has, through God's 



4 6 WORDSWORTH. 

goodness, been realised; and now, approaching the close of my 
seventy-third year, I have a most vivid remembrance of her and 
the beautiful objects with which she was surrounded." Nay, 
more ; he has elsewhere informed us, with some naivete, that the 
first few lines of his exquisite poem to his wife, She was a phantom 
of delight, were originally composed as a description of this High- 
land maid, who would seem almost to have formed for him ever 
afterwards a kind of type and image of loveliness. 

That such a meeting as this should have formed so long-remem- 
bered an incident in the poet's life will appear, perhaps, equally 
ridiculous to the philosopher and to the man of the world. The 
one would have given less, the other would have demanded more. 
And yet the quest of beauty, like the quest of truth, reaps its 
surest reward when it is disinterested as well as keen; and the 
true lover of human kind will often draw his most exquisite 
moments from what to most men seems but the shadow of a joy. 
Especially, as in this case, his heart will be prodigal of the im- 
pulses of that protecting tenderness which it is the blessing of 
early girlhood to draw forth unwittingly, and to enjoy unknown — 
affections which lead to no declaration, and desire no return ; 
which are the spontaneous effluence of the very Spirit of Love in 
man ; and which play and hover around winning innocence like 
the coruscations round the head of the unconscious lulus, a soft 
and unassuming flame. 

It was well,"perhaps, that Wordsworth's romance should come 
to him in this remote and fleeting fashion. For to the Priest of 
Nature it was fitting that all things else should be harmonious, in- 
deed, but accessory ; that joy should not be so keen, nor sorrow 
so desolating, nor love itself so wildly strong, as to prevent him 
from going out upon the mountains with a heart at peace, and 
receiving "in a wise passiveness " the voices of earth and heaven. 



WORDS IVOR 1H. 4 y 



CHAPTER VI. 

SIR GEORGE BEAUMONT. — DEATH OF JOHN WORDSWORTH. 

The year 1803 saw the beginning of a friendship ■'which formed 
a valuable element in Wordsworth's life. Sir George Beaumont, of 
Coleorton Hall, Essex, a descendant of the dramatist, and repre- 
sentative of a family long distinguished for talent and culture, was 
staying with Coleridge at Greta Hall, Keswick, when, hearing of 
Coleridge's affection for Wordsworth, he was struck with the wish 
to bring Wordsworth also to Keswick, and bought and presented 
to him abeautifu' piece of land at Applethwaite, under Skiddaw, in 
the hope that he might be induced to settle there. Coleridge was 
soon afterwards obliged to leave England in search of health, and 
the plan fell through. A characteristic letter of Wordsworth's rec- 
ords his feelings on the occasion. " Dear Sir George," he writes, 
" if any person were to be informed of the particulars of your kind- 
ness to me — if it were described to him in all its delicacy and no- 
bleness — and he should afterwards be told that I suffered eight 
weeks to elapse without writing to you one word of thanks or ac- 
knowledgment, he would deem it a thing absolutely impossible. It 
;s nevertl e ess true. 

" Owing to a set of painful and uneasy sensations which I have, 
more or less, at all times about my chest, I deferred writing to you, 
being at first made still more uncomfortable by travelling, and 
loathing to do violence to myself in what ought to be an act of pure 
pleasure and enjoyment, viz., the expression of my deep sense of 
your goodness. This feeling was indeed so strong in me as to 
make me look upon the act of writing to you as a thing not to be 
done but in my best, my purest, and my happiest moments. Many 
of these I had, but then I had not my pen, ink, and paper before 
me, my conveniences, ' my appliances and means to boot ; ' all 
which, the moment that I thought of them, seemed to disturb and 
impair the sanctity of my pleasure. I contented myself with think- 
ing over my complacent feelings, and breathing forth solitary 
gratulations and thanksgivings, which I did in many a sweet and 
many a wild place, during my late tour." 

The friendship of which this act of delicate generosity was the 
beginning was maintained till Sir George Beaumont's death in 
1827, and formed for many years Wordsworth's closest link with 
the world of art and culture. Sir George was himself a painter as 
well as a connoisseur, and his landscapes are not without indica- 



48 WORDS IVOR 1 7/. 

tions of the strong feeling for nature which he undoubtedly pos« 
sessed. Wordsworth, who had seen very few pictures, but was a 
penetrating critic of those which he knew, discerned this vein of 
true feeling in his friend's work, and has idealised a small landscape 
which Sir George had given him, in a sonnet which reproduces the 
sense of happy pause and voluntary fixation with which the mind 
throws itself into some scene where art has given 

" To one brief moment caught from fleeting time 
The appropriate calm of blest eternity." 

There was another pursuit in which Sir George Beaumont was 
much interested, and in which painter and poet were well fitted to 
unite. The landscape-gardener, as Wordsworth says, should 
" work in the spirit of JNature, with an invisible hand of art." And 
he shows how any real success can only be achieved when the de- 
signer is willing to incorporate himself with the scenery around 
him; to postpone to its indications the promptings of his own pride 
or caprice ; to interpret Nature to herself by completing touches ; 
to correct her with deference, and, as it were, to caress her without 
importunity. And rising to that aspect of the question which con- 
nects it with human society, he is strenuous in condemnation of 
that taste, not so much for solitude as for isolation, which can tol- 
erate no neighbourhood, and finds its only enjoyment in the sense of 
monopoly. 

" Laying out grounds, as it is called, may be considered as a liberal 
art, in some sort like poetry and painting; its object ought to be to move 
the affections under the control of good-sense ; and surely the affections 
of those who have the deepest perception of the beauty of Nature — who 
have the most valuable feelings, that is, the most permanent, the most in- 
dependent, the most ennobling, connected with Nature and human life. 
No liberal art aims merely at the gratification of an individual or a class ; 
the painter or poet is degraded in proportion as he does so. The true 
servants of the arts pay homage to the human-kind as impersonated in un- 
warped and enlightened minds. If this be so when we are merely putting 
together words or colours, how much more ought the feeling to prevail 
when we are in the midst of the realities of things; of the beauty and har- 
mony, of the j w and happiness, of loving creatures ; of men and children, 
of birds and beasts, of hills and streams, and trees and flowers ; with the 
changes of night and day, evening and morning, summer and winter ; and 
all their unwearied actions and energies, as benign in the spirit that ani- 
mates them as they are beautiful and grand in that form of clothing which 
is given to them for the delight of our senses ! What, then, shall we say 
of many great mansions, with their unqualified expulsion of human crea- 
tures from their neighbourhood, happy or not; houses which do what is 
fabledof the upas-tree — breathe out death and desolation ! For my part, 
strip my neighbourhood of human beings, and I think it one of the 
greatest privations I could undergo. You have all the poverty of solitude, 
nothing of its elevation." 

This passage is from a letter of Wordsworth's to Sir George 
Beaumont, who was engaged at the time in rebuilding and laying 



WORDS WOR TH. 49 

out Coleorton. The poet himself planned and superintended some 
of these improvements, and wrote, for various points of interest in 
the grounds, inscriptions which form dignified examples of that 
kind of composition. 

Nor was Sir George Beaumont the only friend whom the poet's 
taste assisted in the choice of a site or the disposition of pleasure- 
grounds. More than one seat in the Lake country — among them 
one home of pre-eminent beauty — have owed to Wordsworth no 
small part of their ordered charm. In this way, too, the poet is 
with us still : his presence has a strange reality as we look on some 
majestic prospect of interwinding lake and mountain which his de- 
sign has made more beautifully visible to the children's children of 
those he loved ; as we stand, perhaps, in some shadowed garden- 
ground where his will has had its way — has framed Helvellyn's far- 
off summit in an arch of tossing green, and embayed in towering 
forest-trees the long lawns of a silent valley — fit haunt for lofty as- 
piration and for brooding calm. 

But of all woodland ways which Wordsworth's skill designed or 
his feet frequented, not one was dearer to him (if I may pass thus 
by a gentle transition to another of the strongaffections of his life) 
than a narrow path through a firwood near his cottage, which " was 
known to the poet's household by the name of John's Grove." For 
in the year 1800 his brother, John Wordsworth, a few years 
younger than himself, and captain of an East lndiaman, had spent 
eight months in the poet's cottage at Grasmere. The two brothers 
had seen little of each other since childhood, and the poet had now 
the delight of discovering in the sailor a character congenial to his 
own, and an appreciation of poetry — and of the Lyrical Ballads 
especially — which was intense and delicate in an unusual degree. 
In both brothers, too, there was the same love of nature ; and after 
John's departure, the poet pleased himself with imagining the vis- 
ions of Grasmere which beguiled the watches of many a night at 
sea, or with tracing the pathway A\h'ch the sailor's instinct had 
planned and trodden amid trees so thickly planted as to baffle a 
less practised skill. John Wordsworth, on the other hand, looked 
forward to Grasmere as the final goal of his wanderings, and in- 
tended to use his own savings to set the poet free from worldly 
cares. 

Two more voyages the sailor made with such hopes as these, 
and amid a frequent interchange of books and letters Avith his 
brother at home. Then, in February, 1805, he set sail from Ports- 
mouth, in command of the "Abergavenny" East lndiaman, bound 
for India and China. Through the incompetence of the pilot who 
was taking her out of the Channel, the ship struck on the Sham- 
bles off the Bill of Portland, on February 5, 1805. " She struck," 
says Wordsworth, " at 5 p.m. Guns were fired immediately, and 
were continued to be fired. She was gotten off the rock at half- 
past seven, but had taken in so much water, in spite of constant 
pumping, as to be water-logged. They had, however, hope that 
she might still be run upon" Weymouth sands, and with this view 

4 



c WORDS WOR TH. 

continued pumping and baling till eleven, when she went down. . . 
A few minutes before the ship went down my brother was seen 
talking to the first mate with apparent cheerfulness; and he was 
standing on the hen-coop, which is the point from which he could 
overlook the whole ship, the moment she went down — dying, as 
he had lived, in the very place and point where his duty stationed 
him." 

»• For myself," he continues elsewhere, " I feel that there is 
something cut out of my life which cannot be restored. J never 
thought of him but with hope and delight. We looked forward to 
the time, not distant, as we thought, when he would settle near 
us— when the task of his life would be over, and he would have 
nothing to do but reap his reward. By that time I hoped also 
that the chief part of my labours would be executed, and that I 
should be able to show him that he had not placed a false confi- 
dence in me. I never wrote a line without a thought of giving 
him pleasure ; my writings, printed and manuscript, were his de- 
light, and one of the chief solaces of his long voyages. But let 
me stop. 1 will not be cast down ; were it only for his sake, I 
will not be dejected. I have much yet to do, and pray God to 
give me strength and power; his part of the agreement between us 
is brought to an end, mine continues; and I hope, when I shall be 
able to think of him with a calmer mind, that the remembrance of 
him dead will even animate me more than the joy which I had in 
him living." 

In these and the following reflections there is nothing of nov- 
elty ; yet there is an interest in the spectacle of this strong and 
simple mind confronted with the universal problems, and taking 
refuge in the thoughts which have satisfied, or scarcely satisfied, 
so many generations of mourning men. 

"A thousand times have I asked myself, as your tender sym- 
pathy led me to do, ' Why was he taken away ? ' and I have an- 
swered the question as you have done. In fact, there is no other 
answer which can satisfy, and lay the mind at rest. Why have 
we a choice, and a will, and a notion of justice and injustice, en- 
abling us to be moral agents ? Why have we sympathies that 
make the best of us so afraid of inflicting pain and sorrow, which 
yet we see dealt about so lavishly by the Supreme Governor ? 
Why should our notions of right towards each other, and to all 
sentient beings within our influence, differ so widelv from what 
appears to be his notion and rule, if everything were to end here? 
Would it not be blasphemy to say that, upon the supposition of 
the thinking principle being destroyed by death, however inferior 
we may be to the great Cause and Rider of things, we have more 
of love in our nature than he has ? The thought is monstrous ; and 
yet how to get rid of it except upon the supposition of another and 
a better world, I do not see." 

From this calamity, as from all the lessons of life, Wordsworth 
drew all the benefit which it was empowered to bring. " A deep 
distress hath humanised my soul " — what lover of poetry does not 



WORDSWORTH. 5I 

know the pathetic lines in which he bears witness to the teaching 
of sorrow ? Other griefs, too, he had — the loss of two children in 
1812; his sister's chronic illness, beginning in 1832 ; his daughter's 
death in 1847. All these he felt to the full ; and yet, until his 
daughter's death, which was more than his failing energies could 
bear, these bereavements were but the thinly-scattered clouds " in 
a great sea of blue " — seasons of mourning here and there among 
years which never lost their hold on peace ; which knew no shame 
and no remorse, no desolation and no fear ; whose days were 
never long with weariness, nor their nights broken at the touch of 
woe. Even when we speak of his tribulations, it is his happiness 
which rises in our minds. 

And inasmuch as this felicity is the great fact of Wordsworth's 
life — since his history is for the most part but the history of a 
halcyon calm — we find ourselves forced upon the question whether 
such a life is to be held desirable or no. Happiness with honour 
was the ideal of Solon ; is it also ours ? To the modern spirit — 
to the Christian, in whose ears counsels of perfection have left " a 
presence that is not to be put by," this question, at which a Greek 
would have smiled, is of no such easy solution. 

To us, perhaps, in computing the fortune of any one whom we 
holddear.it may seem more needful to enquire not whether he has 
had enough of joy, but whether he has had enough of sorrow ; 
whether the blows of circumstance have wholly shaped his char- 
acter from the rock; whether his soul has taken lustre and purity 
in the refiner's fire. Nor is it only (as some might say) for violent 
and faulty natures that sorrow is the best. It is true that by sor- 
row only can the headstrong and presumptuous spirit be shamed 
into gentleness and solemnised into humility. But sorrow is used 
also by the Power above us in cases where we men would have 
shrunk in horror from so rough a touch. Natures that were 
already of a heroic unselfishness, of a childlike purity, have been 
raised ere now by anguish upon anguish, woe after woe, to a 
height of holiness which we may believe that they could have 
reached by no other road. Why should it not be so ? since 
there is no limit to the soul's possible elevation, why should her 
purifying trials have any assignable end ? She is of a metal which 
can grow for ever brighter in the fiercening flame. And if, then, 
we would still pronounce the true Beatitudes not on the rejoicing, 
the satisfied, the highly-honoured, but after an ancient and sterner 
pattern, what account are we to give of Wordsworth's long years 
of blissful calm ? 

In the first place, we may say that his happiness was as wholly 
free from vulgar or transitory elements as a man's can be. It lay 
in a life which most men would have found austere and blank in- 
deed ; a life from which not Croesus only but Solon would have 
turned in scorn; a life of poverty and retirement, of long apparent 
failure, and honour that came tardily at the close ; it was a happi- 
ness nourished on no sacrifice of other men, on no eager 
appropriation of the goods of earth, but springing from a 



52 WORDSWORTH. 

single eye and a loving spirit, and wrought from those pri- 
mary emotions which are the innocent birthright of all. And 
if it be answered that, however truly philosophic, however sacredly 
pure, his happiness may have been, yet its wisdom and its 
holiness were without an effort, and that it is effort which makes 
the philosopher and the saint : then we must use in answer his 
own Platonic scheme of things, to express a thought which we can 
but dimly apprehend ; and we must say that, though progress be 
inevitably linked in our minds with struggle, yet neither do we con- 
ceive of struggle as without a pause ; there must be prospect-places 
in the long ascent of souls ; and the whole of this earthly life — this 
one existence, standing we know not where among the myriad that 
have been for us or shall be — may not be too much to occupy with 
one of those outlooks of vision and of prophecy, when 

" In a season of calm weather, 
Though inland far we be, 
Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
Which brought us hither ; 
Can in a moment travel thither, 
And see the children sport upon the shore, 
And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore." 



WORDSWORTH. 



53 



CHAPTER VII. 

"HAPPY WARRIOR," AND PATRIOTIC POEMS. 

The year 1805, which bereft Wordsworth of a beloved brother 
brought with it also another death, which was felt by the whole 
English nation like a private calamity. The emotion which Words- 
worth felt at the news of Trafalgar — the way in which he managed 
to intertwine the memories of Nelson and of his own brother in 
his heart — may remind us fitly at this point of our story of the dis- 
tress and perplexity of nations which for so many years surrounded 
the quiet Grasmere home, and of the strong responsive emotion 
with which the poet met each shock of European fates. 

When England first took up arms against the French revolu- 
tion, Wordsworth's feeling, as we have seen, had been one of un- 
mixed sorrow and shame. Bloody and terrible as the revolution 
had become, it was still in some sort representative of human free- 
dom ; at any rate, it might still seem to contain possibilities of 
progress such as the retrograde despotisms with which England 
allied herself could never know. But the conditions of the contest 
changed before long. France had not the wisdom, the courage, 
the constancy to play to the end the part for which she had seemed 
chosen among the nations. It was her conduct towards Switzer- 
land which decisively altered Wordsworth's view. He saw her 
valiant spirit of self-defence corrupted into lust of glory ; her eager, 
ness for the abolition of unjust privilege turned into a contentment 
with equality of degradation under a despot's heel. "One man, of 
men the meanest too " — for such the First Consul must needs ap- 
pear to the moralist's eye — was 

" Raised up to sway the world — to do, undo ; 
With mighty nations for his underlings." 

And history herself seemed vulgarised by the repetition of her 
ancient tales of war and overthrow on a scale of such apparent 
magnitude, but with no glamour of distance to hide the baseness of 
the agencies by which the destinies of Europe were shaped anew. 
This was an occasion that tried the hearts of men ; it was not easy 
to remain through all those years at once undazzled and untempted, 
and never in the blackest hour to despair of human virtue. 



5 4 WORDS IVOR TH. 

In his tract on The Convention of Cintra, 1808, Wordsworth 
has given the fullest expression to this undaunted temper : 

" Oppression, its own blind and predestined enemy, has poured this of 
blessedness upon Spain — that the enormity of the outrages of which she 
has been the victim has created an object of love and of hatred, of appre- 
hensions and of wishes, adequate (if that be possible) to the utmost de- 
mands of human spirit. The heart that serves in this cause, if it lan- 
guish, must languish from its own constitutional weakness, and not through 
want of nourishment from without. But it is a belief propagated in books, 
and which passes currently among talking men as part of their familiar 
wisdom, that the hearts of the many are constitutionally weak, that they 
do languish, and are slow to answer to the requisitions of things. I 
entreat those who are in this delusion to look behind them and 
about them for the evidence of experience. Now this, rightly under- 
stood, not only gives no support to any such belief, but proves that the 
truth is in direct opposition to it. The history of all ages — tumults after 
tumults, wars foreign or civil, with short or with no breathing-places 
from generation to generation ; the senseless weaving and interweaving of 
factions, vanishing, and reviving, and piercing each other like the Nor- 
thern Lights ; public commotions and those in the breast of the individual ; 
the long calenture to which the Lover is subject ; the blast, like the blast 
of the desert, which sweeps perennially through a frightful solitude of its 
own making in the mind of the Gamester ; the slowly quickening, but 
ever quickening, descent of appetite down which the Miser is propelled ; 
the agonv, and cleaving oppression of grief ; the ghost-like hauntings of 
shame ; the incubus of revenge ; the life-distemper of ambition . . . 
these demonstrate incontestably that the passions of men (I mean the soul 
of sensibility in the heart of man), in all quarrels, in all contests, in all 
quests, in all delights, in all employments which are either sought by men 
or thrust upon them, do immeasurably transcend their objects. The true 
sorrow of humanity consists in this — not that the mind of man fails, but 
that the cause and demands of action and of life so rarely correspond with 
the dignity and intensity of human desires ; and hence, that which is slow 
to languish is too easily turned aside and abused. But. with the remem- 
brance of what has been done, and in the face of the interminable evils 
which are threatened, a Spaniard can never have cause to complain of 
this while a follower of the tyrant remains inarms upon the Peninsula." 

It was passages such as this, perhaps, which led Canning to de- 
clare that Wordsworth's pamphlet was the finest piece of political 
eloquence which had appeared since Burke. And yet if we com- 
pare it with Burke, or with the great Greek exemplar of all those 
who would give speech the cogency of act — we see at once the 
causes of its practical failure. In Demosthenes the thoughts and 
principles are often as lofty as any patriot can express ; but their 
loftiness, in his speech, as in the very truth of things, seemed but 
to add to their immediate reality. They were beaten and inwoven 
into the facts of the hour ; action seemed to turn on them as on its 
only possible pivot ; it was as though Virtue and Freedom hung 
armed in heaven above the assembly, and in the visible likeness of 
immortal ancestors beckoned upon an urgent way. Wordsworth's 
mood of mind, on the other hand, as he has depicted it in two son' 



WORDS WOR TH. 5 5 

nets written at the same time as his tract, explains why it was that 
that appeal was rather a solemn protest than an effective exhorta- 
tion. In the first sonnet he describes the surroundings of his task 
— the dark wood and rocky cave, " the hollow vale which foaming 
torrents fill with omnipresent murmur : " 

" Here mighty Nature ! in this school sublime 
I weigh the hopes and fears of suffering Spain ; 
For her consult the auguries of time, 
And through the human heart explore my way, 
And look and listen, gathering whence I may 
Triumph, and thoughts no bondage can restrain." 

And then he proceeds to conjecture what effect his tract will pro- 
duce : 

" I dropped my pen, and listened to the wind, 
That sang of trees uptorn and vessels tost 
A midnight harmony, and wholly lost 
To the general sense of men, by chains confined 
Of business, care, or pleasure, — or resigned 
To timely sleep. Thought I, the impassioned train 
Without which aid of numbers I sustain 
i Like acceptation from the world will find." 

This deliberate and lonely emotion was fitter to inspire grave poetry 
than a pamphlet appealing to an immediate crisis. And the son- 
nets dedicated To Liberty (1802-16) are the outcome of many 
moods like these. 

It is little to say of these sonnets that they are the most perma- 
nent record in our literature of the Napoleonic war. For that dis- 
tinction they have few competitors. Two magnificent songs of 
Campbell's, an ode of Coleridge's, a few spirited stanzas of Byron's 
— strangely enough there is little besides these that lives in the 
national memory, till we come to the ode which summed up the 
long contest a generation later, when its great captain passed 
away. But these Sonnets to Liberty are worthy of comparison 
with the noblest passages of patriotic verse or prose which all our 
history has inspired — the passages where Shakspeare brings his 
rays to focus on " this earth, this realm, this England " — or where 
the dread of national dishonour has kindled Chatham to an iron 
glow — or where Milton rises from the polemic into the prophet, 
and Burke from the partisan into the philosopher. The armoury 
of Wordsworth, indeed, was not forged with the same fire as that 
of these "invincible knights of old." He had not swayed senates, 
nor directed policies, nor gathered into one ardent bosom all the 
spirit of a heroic age. But he had deeply felt what it is that makes 
the greatness of nations; in that extremity no man was more 
staunch than he ; no man more unwaveringly disdained unrighteous 
empire, or kept the might of moral forces more steadfastly in view. 
Not Stein could place a manlier reliance on "a few strong instincts 
and a few plain rules ; " not Fichte could invoke more convincingly 
he "great allies" which work with "Man's unconquerable mind." 



s 6 WORDS WOR TH. 

Here and there, indeed, throughout these sonnets are scattered 
strokes of high poetic admiration or scorn which could hardly be 
overmatched in yEschylus. Such is the indignant correction — 

"Call not the royal Swede unfortunate, 
Who never did to Fortune bend the knee ! " 

or the stern touch which closes a description of Flamininus's proc* 
lamation at the Isthmian games, according liberty to Greece — 

" A gift of that which is not to be given 
By all the blended powers of Earth and Heaven ! " 

Space forbids me to dwell in detail on these noble poems — on 
the well-known sonnets to Venice, to Milton, &c. ; on the generous 
tributes to the heroes of the contest — Schill, Hoffer, Toussaint, 
Palafox ; or on the series which contrast the instinctive greatness 
of the Spanish people at bay with Napoleon's lying promises and 
inhuman pride. But if Napoleon's career afforded to Wordsworth 
a poetic example, impressive as that of Xerxes to the Greeks, of 
lawless and intoxicated power, there was need of some contrasted 
figure more notable than Hoffer or Palafox from which to draw the 
lessons which great contests can teach of unselfish valour. Was 
there then any man, by land or sea, who might serve as the poet's 
type of the ideal hero ? To an Englishman, at least, this question 
carries its own reply. For by a singular destiny England, with a 
thousand years of noble history behind her, has chosen for her 
best-beloved, for her national hero, not an Arminius from the age 
of legend, not a Henri Ouatre from the age of chivalry, but a man 
whom men still living have seen and known. For, indeed. England 
and all the world as to this man were of one accord ; and when in 
victory, on his ship Victory, Nelson passed away, the thrill which 
shook mankind was of a nature such as perhaps was never felt at 
any other death— so unanimous was the feeling of friends and foes 
that earth had lost her crowning example of impassioned self-de- 
votedness and of heroic honour. 

And yet it might have seemed that between Nelson's nature 
and Wordsworth's there was little in common. The obvious limi- 
tations of the great Admiral's culture and character were likely to 
be strongly felt by the philosophic poet. And a serious crime, of 
which Nelson was commonly, though, as now appears, erroneously,* 
supposed to be guilty, was sure to be judged by Wordsworth 
with great severity. 

Wordsworth was, in fact, hampered by some such feelings of 
disapproval. He even tells us, with that naive affectionateness 
which often makes us smile, that he has had recourse to the char- 
acter of his own brother John for the qualities in which the great 

•The researches of Sir Nicholas Nicolas {Letters and Despatches of Lord Nelson, 
vol. viu, Appendix) have placed Lord Nelson's connexion with Lady Hamilton in an un« 
expected light. 



WORDS IVOR J II. 



57 



Admiral appeared to him to have been deficient. But on these 
hesitations it would be unjust to dwell. I mention them only to 
bring out the fact that between these two men, so different in out- 
ward fates — between "the adored, the incomparable Nelson" 
and the homely poet, " retired as noontide dew " — there was a 
moral likeness so profound that the ideal of the recluse was realised 
in the public life of the hero, and, on the other hand, the hero him- 
self is only seen as completely heroic when his impetuous life 
stands out for us from the solemn background of the poet's calm. 
And surely these two natures taken together make the perfect 
Englishman. Nor is there any portrait fitter than that of The 
Happy Warrior tin go forth to all lands as representing the English 
character at its height — a figure not ill-matching with ''Plutarch's 
men." 

For indeed this short poem is in itself a manual of greatness ; 
there is a Roman majesty in its simple and weighty speech. And 
what eulogy was ever nobler than that passage where, without 
definite allusion or quoted name, the poet depicts, as it were, the 
very summit of glory in the well-remembered aspect of the Admiral 
in his last and greatest hour ? 

" Whose powers shed round him, in the common strife, 
Or mild concerns of ordinary life, 
A constant influence, a peculiar grace ; 
But who, if he be called upon to face 
Some awful moment to which Heaven has joined 
Great issues, good or bad for human kind, 
Is happy as a Lover, and attired 
With sudden brightness, like a Man inspired." 

Or again, where the hidden thought of Nelson's womanly ten- 
derness, of his constant craving for the green earth and home 
affections in the midst of storm and war, melts the stern verses 
into a sudden change of tone : 

" He who, though thus endued as with a sense 
And faculty for storm and turbulence, 
Is yet a Soul whose master -bias leans 
To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes ; 
Sweet images ! which, wheresoe'er he be, 
Are at his heart; and such fidelity 
It is his darling passion to approve ; — 
More brave for this, that he hath much to love." 

Compare with this the end of the Son? at Brougham Castle. 
where, at the words "alas! the fervent 'harper did not know— " 
the strain changes from the very spirit of chivalry to the gentle- 
ness of nature's calm. Nothing can be more characteristic of 
Wordsworth than contrasts like this. They teach us to remember 
that his accustomed mildness is the fruit of no indolent or senti- 
mental peace ; and that, on the other hand, when his counsels are 



5 8 WORDS IVOR TH\ 

sternest, and " his voice is still for war," this is no voice of hard- 
ness or of vainglory, but the reluctant resolution of a heart which 
fain would yield itself to other energies, and have no message but 
of love. 

There is one more point in which the character of Nelson lias 
fallen in with one of the lessons which Wordsworth is never tired 
of enforcing, the lesson that virtue grows by the strenuousness of 
its exercise, that it gains strength as it wrestles with pain and diffi- 
culty, and converts the shocks of circumstance into an energy of 
its proper glow. The Happy Warrior is one, 

" Who, doomed to go in company with Pain, 
And Fear, and Bloodshed, miserable train ! 
Turns his necessity to glorious gain ; 
In face of these doth exercise a power 
Which is our human nature's highest dower; 
Controls them and subdues, transmutes, bereaves 
Of their bad influence, and their good receives ; 
By objects which might force the soul to abate 
Her feeling, rendered more compassionate ; " 

and so further, in words which recall the womanly tenderness, the 
almost exaggerated feeling for others' pain, which showed itself 
memorably in face of the blazing Orient, and in the harbour at 
Teneriffe, and in the cockpit at Trafalgar. 

In such lessons as these — such lessons as The Happy Warrior 
or the Patriotic Sonnets teach — there is, of course, little that is 
absolutely novel. We were already aware that the ideal hero 
should be as gentle as he is brave, that he should act always from 
the highest motives, nor greatly care for any reward save the con- 
sciousness of having done his duty. We were aware that the true 
strength of a nation is moral, and not material ; that dominion 
which rests on mere military force is destined quickly to decay; 
that the tyrant, however admired and prosperous, is in reality de- 
spicable, and miserable, and alone ; that the true man should face 
death itself rather than parley with dishonour. These truths are 
admitted \n all ages; yet it is scarcely stretching language to say 
that they are known to but few men. Or at least, though in a 
great nation there be many who will act on them instinctively, and 
approve them by a self-surrendering faith, there are few who can 
so put them forth in speech as to "bring them home with a fresh 
conviction and an added glow ; who can sum up, like iEschylus, 
the contrast between Hellenic freedom and barbarian despotism in 
" one trump's peal that set all Greeks aflame ; " can thrill, like 
Virgil, a world-wide empire with the recital of the august simpli- 
cities of early Rome. 

To those who would know these things with a vital knowledge— 
a conviction which would remain unshaken were the whole world 
in arms for wrong — it is before all things necessary to strengthen 
the inner monitions by the companionship of these noble souls. 
And if a poet, by strong concentration of thought, by striving in 



WORDS WOR TH. cq 

all things along the upward way, can leave us in a few pages, as it 
were, a summary of patriotism, a manual of national honour, he 
surely has his place among his country's benefactors not only by 
that kind of courtesy which the nation extends to men of letters of 
whom her masses take little heed, but with a title as assured as 
any warrior or statesman, and with no less direct a claim. 



6o WORDSWORTH. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

CHILDREN. — LIFE AT RYDAL MOUNT. — "THE EXCURSION." 

It may be well at this point to return to the quiet chronicle of 
the poet's life at Grasmere ; where his cottage was becoming too 
small for an increasing family. His eldest son, John, was born in 
1803; his eldest daughter, Dorothy or Dora, in 1804. Then came 
Thomas, born 1806; and Catherine, born 1808; and the list is 
ended by William, born 1810, and now (1880) the only survivor. 
In the spring of 1808 Wordsworth left Townend for Allan Bank — 
a more roomy but an uncomfortable house, at the north end of 
Grasmere. From thence he removed for a time, in 181 1, to the 
Parsonage at Grasmere. 

Wordsworth was the most affectionate of fathers, and allusions 
to his children occur frequently in his poetry. Dora — who was 
the delight of his later years — has been described at length in The 
Triad. Shorter and simpler, but more completely successful, is 
the picture of Catherine in the little poem which begins " Loving 
she is, and tractable, though wild," with its homely simile for child- 
hood — its own existence sufficient to fill it with gladness : 

" As a faggot sparkle^ on the hearth 
Not less if unattended and alone 
Than when both young and old sit gathered round 
And take delight in its activity." 

The next notice of this beloved child is in the sonnet, " Sur« 
prised by joy, impatient as the wind," written when she had already 
been removed from his side. She died in 181 2, and was closely 
followed by her brother Thomas. Wordsworth's grief for these 
children was profound, violent, and lasting, to an extent which those 
who imagine him as not only calm bui. passionless might have some 
difficulty in believing. " Referring once," says his friend Mr. 
Aubrey de Vere, " to two young children of his who had died about 
forty years previously, he described the details of their illnesses with 
an exactness and an impetuosity of troubled excitement such as 
might have been expected if the bereavement had taken place but 
a few weeks before. The lapse of time seemed to have left the 
sorrow submerged indeed, but still in all its first freshness. Yet I 
afterwards heard that at the time of the illness, at least in the case 
of one of the two children, it was impossible to rouse his attention 



WORDSWORTH. 6t 

to the danger. He chanced to be then under the immediate spell 
of one of those fits of poetical inspiration which descended on him 
like a cloud. Till the cloud had drifted, he could see nothing 
beyond." • 

This anecdote illustrates the fact, which to those who knew 
Wordsworth well was sufficiently obvious, that the characteristic 
calm of his writings was the result of no coldness of temperament, but 
of a deliberate philosophy. The pregnant force of his language in 
dealing with those dearest to him — his wife, his sister, his brother 
— is proof enough of this. The frequent allusions in his corres- 
pondence to the physical exhaustion brought on by the act of poet- 
ical composition indicate a frame which, though made robust by 
exercise and temperance, was by nature excitable rather than strong. 
And even in the direction in which we should least have expected 
it, there is reason to believe that there were capacities of feeling in 
him which never broke from his control. "Had I been a writer 
of love-poetry," he is reported to have said, " it would have been 
natural to me to write it with a degree of warmth which could hardly 
have been approved by my principles, and which might have been 
undesirable for the reader." 

Wordsworth's paternal feelings, at any rate, were, as has been 
said, exceptionally strong; and the impossibility of remaining in a 
house filled with sorrowful memories rendered him doubly anxious 
to obtain a permanent home. "The house which I have for some 
time occupied," he writes to Lord Lonsdale, in January, 1813, "is 
the Parsonage ot Grasmere. It stands close by the churchyard, and 
I have found it absolutely necessary that we should quit a place 
which, by recalling to our minds at every moment the losses we 
have sustained in the course of the last year, would grievously re- 
tard our progress towards that tranquillity which it is our duty to 
aim at." It happened that Rydal Mount became vacant ^t this 
moment, and in the spring of 1813 the Wordsworths migrated to 
this their favourite and last abode. 

Rydal Mount has probably been oftener described than any 
other English poet's home since Shakspeare ; and few homes, 
certainly, have been moulded into such close accordance with their 
inmates' nature. The house, which has been altered since Words- 
worth's day, stands, looking southward, on the rocky side of Nab 
Scar, above Rydal Lake. The garden was described by Bishop 
Wordsworth immediately after his uncle's death, while every ter- 
race-walk and flowering alley spoke of the poet's loving care. He 
tells of the ' ; tall ash-tree, in which a thrush has sung, for hours 
together, during many years;" of the "laburnum in which the 
osier cage of the doves was hung; "of the stone steps "in the 
interstices of which grow the yellow flowering poppy, and the 
wild geranium or Poor Robin " — 

"Gay 
With his red stalks upon a sunny day." 

And then of the terraces — one levelled for Miss Fenwick's use, and 



6 2 WORDS IVOR TIL 

welcome to himself in aged years ; and one ascending, and leading 
to the "far terrace " on the mountain's side, where the poet was 
wont to murmur his verses as they came. Within the house were 
chsposed his simple treasures : the ancestral almery, on which the 
names of unknown Wordsworths may be deciphered still ; Sir 
George Beaumont's pictures of " The White Doe of Rylstone " and 
" The Thorn/' and the cuckoo clock which brought vernal thoughts 
to cheer the sleepless bed of age, and which sounded its noonday 
summons when his spirit fled. 

Wordsworth's worldly fortunes, as if by some benignant guard- 
ianship of Providence, were at all times proportioned to his succes- 
sive needs. About the date of his removal to Rydal (in March, 
1813) he was appointed, through Lord Lonsdale's interest, to the 
distributorship of stamps for the county of Westmoreland, to which 
office the same post for Cumberland was afterwards added. He 
held this post till August, 1842, when he resigned it without a retir- 
ing pension, and it was conferred on his second son. He was al- 
lowed to reside at Rydal, which was counted as a suburb of Amble- 
side ; and as the duties of the place were light, and mainly per- 
formed by a most competent and devoted clerk, there was no draw- 
back to the advantage of an increase of income which released him 
from anxiety as to the future. A more lucrative office — the col- 
lectorship of Whitehaven — was subsequently offered to him ; but he 
declined it, "nor would exchange his Sabine valley for riches and 
a load of care." 

Though Wordsworth's life at Rydal was a retired one, it was not 
that of a recluse. As years went on he became more and more 
recognized as a centre of spiritual strength and illumination, and 
was sought not only by those who were already his neighbours, but 
by some who became so mainly for his sake. Southey at Keswick 
was a valued friend, though Wordsworth did not greatly esteem 
him as a poet. De Ouincey, originally attracted to the district by 
admiration for Wordsworth, remained there for many years, and 
poured forth a criticism strangely compounded of the utterances of 
the hero-worshipper and the valet- de-chambre. Professor Wilson, 
of the Nodes Ambrosiaiice, never showed, perhaps, to so much 
advantage as when he walked by the side of the master whose 
greatness he was one of the first to detect. Dr. Arnold of Rugby 
made the neighbouring home at Fox How a focus of warm affections 
and of intellectual life. And Hartley Coleridge, whose fairy child- 
hood had inspired one of Wordsworth's happiest pieces, continued 
to lead among the dales of Westmoreland a life which snowed how 
much of genius and goodness a single weakness can nullify. 

Other friends there were, too, less known to fame, but of excep- 
tional powers of appreciation and sympathy. The names of Mrs. 
Fletcher and her daughters, Lady Richardson and Mrs. Davy, 
should not be omitted in any record of the poet's life at Rydal. 
And many humbler neighbours may be recognised in the characters 
of the Excursion and other poems. The Wanderer, indeed, is a 
picture of Wordsworth himself — " an idea," as he says, " of what 



WORDSWORTH. 



63 



I fancied my own character might have become in his circum- 
stances." But the Solitary was suggested by a broken man who 
took refuge in Grasmere from the world in which he had found no 
peace ; and the characters described as lying in the churchyard 
among the mountains are almost all of them portraits. The clergy- 
man and his family described in Book VII. were among the poet's 
principal associates in the vale of Grasmere. " There was much 
talent in the family," says Wordsworth, in the memoranda dictated 
to Miss Fenwick ; " and the eldest son was distinguished for poetical 
talent, of which a specimen is given in my Notes to the Sonnets on 
the Duddon. Once when, in our cottage at Townend, I was talking 
with him about poetry in the course of our conversation I presumed 
to find fault with the versification of Pope, of whom he was an en- 
thusiastic admirer. He defended him with a warmth that indicated 
much irritation; nevertheless, I could not abandon my point, and 
said, ' In compass and variety of sound your own versification sur- 
passes his.' Never shall I forget the change of his countenance and 
tone of voice. The storm was laid in a moment ; he no longer 
disputed my judgment ; and I passed immediately in his mind, no 
doubt, for as great a critic as ever lived." 

It was with personages simple and unromantic as these that 
Wordsworth filled the canvas of his longest poem. Judged by or- 
dinary standards the Excursion appears an epic without action, 
and with two heroes, the Pastor and the Wanderer, whose char- 
acters are identical. Its form is cumbrous in the extreme, and 
large tracts of it have little claim to the name of poetry. Words- 
worth compares the Excursion to a temple of which his smaller 
poems form subsidiary shrines ; but the reader will more often 
liken the small poems to gems, and the Excursion to the rock from 
which they were extracted. The long poem contains, indeed mag- 
nificent passages, but as a whole it is a diffused description li 
scenery which the poet has elsewhere caught in brighter ^limpses ■ 
a diffused statement of hopes and beliefs which have crystallized 
more exquisitely elsewhere round moments of inspiring emotion. 
The Excursion in short, has the drawbacks of a didactic poem as 
compared with lyrical poems ; but, judged as a didactic poem it has 
the advantage of containing teaching of true and permanent value. 

I shall not attempt to deduce a settled scheme of philosophy 
from these discourses among the mountains. I would urge only 
hp;;\ S l I gU H e t0 C ° n t C \ Wordsworth's precepts are "not in 
nt^l 'mT unmtelh ? lble or visionary/ For whereas some 
moralists would have us amend Nature, and others bid us follow 
her there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, 
and something vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, en. 
thusiasm, ecstasy— all systems which imply an unnatural repression 
or an unnatural excitation of our faculties— are ill-suited for the mass 
of mankind. And on the other hand, if we are told to follow nature 
to develop our original character, we are too often in doubt as to 
which of our conflicting instincts to follow, what part of our 
complex nature to accept as our regulating self. But Words- 



6 4 WORDS IVOR TH. 

worth, while impressing on us conformity to nature as the rule 
of life, suggests a text of such conformity which can be prac- 
tically applied. " The child is father of the man "—in the words 
which stand as introduction to his poetical works, and Wordsworth 
holds that the instincts and pleasures of a healthy childhood suffi- 
ciently indicate the lines on which our maturer character should be 
formed. The joy which began in the mere sense of existence 
should be maintained by hopeful faith ; the simplicity which began 
in inexperience should be recovered by meditation ; the love which 
originated in the family circle should e'xpand itself over the race of 
men. And the calming and elevating influence of Nature— which 
to Wordsworth's memory seemed the inseparable concomitant of 
childish years— should be constantly invoked throughout life to 
keep the heart fresh and the eyes open to the mysteries discernible 
through her radiant veil. In a word, the family affections, if duly 
fostered, the influences of Nature, if duly sought, with some knowl- 
edge of the best books, are material enough to "build up our moral 
being " and to outweigh the less deep-seated impulses which prompt 
to wrong-doing. 

If, then, surrounding influences make so decisive a difference 
in man's moral lot, what are we to say of those who never had the 
chance of receiving those influences aright; who are reared, with 
little parental supervision, in smoky cities, and spend their lives in 
confined and monotonous labour ? One of the most impressive 
passages in the Excursion is an indignant complaint of the injus- 
tice thus done to the factory child. Wordsworth was no fanatical 
opponent of manufacturing industry. He had intimate friends 
among manufacturers ; and in one of his letters he speaks of prom- 
ising himself much pleasure from witnessing the increased regard 
for the welfare of factory hands of which one of these friends had 
set the example. But he never lost sight of the fact that the life 
of the mill-hand is an anomaly — is a life not in the order of nature, 
and which requires to be justified by manifest necessity and by 
continuous care. The question to what extent we may acquiesce 
in the continuance of a low order of human beings, existing for our 
enjoyment rather than for their own, may be answered with plausibil- 
ity in very different tones ; from the Communist who cannot 
acquiesce in the inferiority of any man's position to any other's, 
to the philosopher who holds that mankind has made the most emi- 
nent progress when a few chosen individuals have been supported 
in easy brilliancy by a population of serfs or slaves. Wordsworth's 
answer to this question is at once conservative and philanthropic. 
He holds to the distinction of classes, and thus admits a difference 
in the fulness and value of human lots. But he will not consent 
to any social arrangement which implies a necessary moral inferi- 
ority in any section of the body politic ; and he esteems it the 
statesman's first duty to provide that all citizens shall be placed 
under conditions of life which, however humble, shall not be unfa- 
vourable to virtue. 

His views on national education, which at first sight appear so 



WORDSWORTH. 65 

inconsistent, depend on the same conception of national welfare. 
Wordsworth was one of the earliest and most emphatic proclaimers 
of the duty of the State in this respect. The lines in which he in. 
sists that every child ought to be taught to read are, indeed, often 
quoted as an example of the moralising baldness of much of his 
blank verse. But, on the other hand, when a great impulse was 
given to education (1820-30) by Bell and Lancaster, by the intro- 
duction of what was called the " Madras system " of tuition by 
pupil-teachers, and the spread of infant schools, Wordsworth was 
found unexpectedly in the opposite camp. Considering as he did 
all mental requirements as entirely subsidiary to moral progress, 
and in themselves of very little value, he objected to a system 
which, instead of confining itself to reading — that indispensable 
channel of moral nutriment— aimed at communicating knowledge 
as varied and advanced as time and funds would allow. He ob- 
jected to the dissociation of school and home life — to that relega- 
tion of domestic interests and duties to the background, which 
large and highly-organised schools, and teachers much above the 
home level, must necessarily involve. And yet more strongly, and 
as it may still seem to many minds, with convincing reason, he ob- 
jected to an eleemosynary system, which "precludes the poor 
mother from the strongest motive human nature can be actuated bv 
for industry, for forethought, and self-denial." "The Spartan," he 
said, " and other ancient communities, might disregard domestic 
ties, because they had the substitution of country, which we cannot 
have. Our course is to supplant domestic attachments, without the 
possibility of substituting others more capacious. What can grow 
out of it but selfishness ? " The half-century which has elapsed 
since Wordsworth wrote these words has evidently altered the 
state of the question. It has impressed on us the paramount 
necessity of national education, for reasons political and social too 
well known to repeat. But it may be feared that it has also shifted 
the incidence of Wordsworth's arguments in a more sinister manner, 
by vastly increasing the number of those homes where domestic in- 
fluence of the kind which the poet saw around him at Rydal is 
altogether wanting, and school is the best avenue even to moral 
well-being. " Heaven and hell," he writes in 180S, "are scarcely 
more different from each other than Sheffield and Manchester, &c, 
differ from the plains and valleys of Surrey, Essex, Cumberland, or 
Westmoreland." It is to be feared, indeed, that even " the plains 
and valleys of Surrey and Essex " contain many cottages whose 
fipiritual and sanitary conditions fall far short of the poet's ideal. 
But it is of course in the great and growing centres of population 
that the dangers which he dreads have come upon us in their most 
aggravated form. And so long as there are in England so many 
homes to which parental care and the influences of nature are alike 
unknown, no protest in favour of the paramount importance of these 
primary agencies in the formation of character can be regarded as 
altogether out of date. 

With such severe and almost prosaic themes is the greater part 

5 



66 WORDSWORTH. 

of the Excursion occupied. Yet the poem is far from being com- 
posed throughout in a prosaic spirit. "Of its bones is coral 
made ; " its arguments and theories have lain long in Wordsworth's 
mind, and have accreted to themselves a rich investiture of obser- 
vation and feeling. Some of its passages rank among the poet's 
highest flights. Such is the passage in Book I. describing the 
boy's rapture at sunrise ; and a picture of a sunset at the close of 
the same book. Such is the opening of Book IV. ; and the passage 
describing the wild joy of roaming through a mountain storm ; and 
the metaphor in the same book which compares the mind's power of 
transfiguring the obstacles which beset her, with the glory into 
which the moon incorporates the umbrage that would intercept her 
beams. 

It would scarcely be possible at the present day that a work 
containing such striking passages, and so much of substance and 
elevation — however out of keeping it might be with the ruling taste 
of the clay — should appear without receiving careful study from 
many quarters and warm appreciation in some recognised organs 
of opinion. Criticism in Wordsworth's day was both less compe- 
tent and less conscientious, and the famous " this will never do " of 
Jeffrey in the Edinbu?-gh Review was by no means an extreme 
specimen of the general tone in which the work was received. 
The judgment of the reviewers influenced popular taste ; and the 
book was as decided a pecuniary failure as Wordsworth's previous 
ventures had been. 

And here, perhaps, is a fit occasion to speak of that strangely 
violent detraction and abuse which formed so large an ingredient 
in Wordsworth's life— or, rather, of that which is the only element 
of permanent interest in such a matter — his manner of receiving 
and replying to it. No writer, probably, who has afterwards 
achieved a reputation at all like Wordsworth's, has been so long 
represented by reviewers as purely ridiculous. And in Words- 
worth's manner of acceptance of this fact we may discern all the 
strength, and something of the stiffness, of his nature ; we may 
recognize an almost, but not quite, ideal attitude under the shafts 
of unmerited obloquy. For he who thus is arrogantly censured 
should remember both the dignity and the frailty of man ; he should 
wholly forgive, and almost wholly forget; but, nevertheless, should 
retain such serviceable hints as almost any criticism, however harsh 
or reckless, can afford, and go on his way with no bitter broodings, 
but yet (to use Wordsworth's expression in another context) " with 
a melancholy in the soul, a sinking inward into ourselves from 
thought to thought, a steady remonstrance, and a high resolve." 

How far his own self-assertion may becomingly be carried in 
reply, is another and a delicate question. There is almost necessa- 
rily something distasteful to us not only in self-praise but even in 
a thorough self-appreciation. We desire of the ideal character 
that his faculties of admiration should be, as it were, absorbed in 
an eager perception of the merits of others — that a kind of shrink- 
ing delicacy should prevent him from appraising his own achieve 



WORDSWORTH. 



67 



ments with a similar care. Often, indeed, there is something most 
winning in a touch of humourous blindness : "Well, Miss Sophia, 
and how do you like the Lady of the Lake f " " Oh, I've not read 
it; papa says there's nothing so bad for young people as reading 
bad poetry." 

But there are circumstances under which this graceful absence 
of self-consciousness can no longer be maintained. When a man 
believes that he has a message to deliver that vitally concerns man- 
kind, and when that message is received with contempt and apathy, 
he is necessarily driven back upon himself; he is forced to con- 
sider whether what he has to say is after all so important, and 
whether his mode of saying it be right and adequate. A necessity 
of this kind was forced upon both Shelley and Wordsworth. Shel- 
ley — the very type of self-forgetful enthusiasm — was driven at last 
by the world's treatment of him into a Aeries of moods sometimes 
bitter and sometimes self-distrustful — into a sense of aloofness and 
detachment from the mass of men, which the poet who would fain 
improve and exalt them should do his utmost not to feel. On Words- 
worth's more stubborn nature the effect produced by many years 
of detraction was of a different kind. Naturally introspective, he 
was driven by abuse and ridicule into taking stock of himself more 
frequently and more laboriously than ever. He formed an estimate 
of himself and his writings which was, on the whole (as will now be 
generally admitted), a just one; and this view he expressed when 
occasion offered — in sober language, indeed, but with calm convic- 
tion, and with precisely the same air of speaking from undoubted 
knowledge as when he described the beauty of Cumbrian moun- 
tains or the virtue of Cumbrian homes. 

"It is impossible," he wrote to Lady Beaumont in 1807, "that 
any expectations can be lower than mine concerning the immediate 
effect of this little work upon what is called the public. I do not 
here take into consideration the envy and malevolence, and all the 
bad passions which always stand in the way of a work of any merit 
from a living poet ; but merely think of the pure, absolute, honest 
ignorance in which all worldlings, of every rank and situation, must 
be enveloped, with respect to the thoughts, feelings, and images 
on which the life of my poems depends. The things which I have 
taken, whether from within or without, what have they to do with 
routs, dinners, morning calls, hurry from door to door, from street to 
street, on foot or in carriage ; with Mr. Pitt or Mr. Fox, Mr. Paul 
or Sir Francis Burdett, the Westminster election or the borough of 
Honiton ? In a word — for I cannot stop to make my way through 
the hurry of images that present themselves to me — what have they 
to do with endless talking about things that nobody cares anything 
for, except as far as their own vanity is concerned, and this with 
persons they care nothing for, but as their vanity or selfishness is 
concerned? What have "they to do (to say all at once) with a life 
without love ? In such a life there can be no thought ; for we have 
no thought (save thoughts of pain), but as far as we have love and 
admiration. 



68 WORDSWORTH. 

" It is an awful truth, that there neither is nor can be any gen- 
uine enjoyment of poetry among nineteen out of twenty of those 
persons who live, or wish to live, in the broad light of the world— 
among those who either are, or are striving to make themselves, 
people of consideration in society. This is a truth, and an awful 
one ; because to be incapable of a feeling of poetry, in my sense 
of the word, is to be without love of human nature and reverence 
for God. 

" Upon this I shall insist elsewhere ; at present let me confine 
myself to my object, which is to make you, my dear friend, as 
easy-hearted as myself with respect to these poems. Trouble not 
yourself upon their present reception. Of what moment is that 
compared with what I trust is their destiny ?— to console the af- 
flicted; to add sunshine to daylight, by making the happy happier; 
to teach the young and the gracious of every age to see, to think, 
and feel, and therefore to become more actively and securely vir- 
tuous ; this is their office, which I trust they will faithfully perform 
long after we (that is, all that is mortal of us) are mouldered in 
our graves." 

Such words as these come with dignity from the mouth of a 
man like Wordsworth when he has been, as it were, driven to bay 
— when he is consoling an intimate friend, distressed at the torrent 
of ridicule which, as she fears, must sweep his self-confidence 
and his purposes away. He may be permitted to assure her that 
"my ears are stone-dead to this idle buzz, and my flesh as insensi- 
ble as iron to these petty stings, and to accompany his assurance 
with a reasoned statement of the grounds of his unshaken hopes. 

We feel, however, that such an expression of self-reliance on 
the part of a great man should be accompanied with some proof 
that no conceit or impatience is mixed with his steadfast calm. If 
he believes the public to be really unable to appreciate himself, he 
must show no surprise when they admire his inferiors ; he must 
remember that the case would be far worse if they admired no one 
at all. Nor must he descend from his own unpopular merits on 
the plea that after catching the public attention by what is bad he 
will retain it for what is good. If he is so sure that he is in the 
right he can afford to wait and let the world come round to him. 
Wordsworth's conduct satisfies both these tests. It is, indeed, 
curious to observe how much abuse this inoffensive recluse re- 
ceived, and how absolutely he avoided returning it. Byron, for 
instance, must have seemed in his eyes guilty of something far 
more injurious to mankind than "a drowsy, frowsy poem, called 
the Excursion" could possibly appear. But, except in one or two 
private letters, Wordsworth has never alluded to Byron at all. 
Shelley's lampoon — a singular instance of the random blows of a 
noble spirit, striking at what, if better understood, it would eagerly 
have revered — Wordsworth seems never to have read. Nor did 
the violent attacks of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Reviews 
provoke him to any rejoinder. To " English Bards and Scotch 
Reviewers " — leagued against him as their common prey — he op- 



-DS WORTH. Sg 

posed a dignified silence : and the only moral injur}- which he 
derived fr ay in that 

A led him to treat everything 
he had once written down as : ation, 

and to . equal es. is most trifling as on his 

most impc — and The Idiot Boy 

The Cuckoo or The Daffodils. The I rumour is 

the first grace whic. under persecution; and mac 

sworth's heaviness and stiff exposition of commonpk 
to be traced to i -hich he could scarcely avoid, tfaa 

day long he hac to a perverse and gainsaying 

- 
To the pecuniary loss inflicted on him by : trse criti- 

■ as far from expecting, or even 

ely ] make a rapid fortune : but he 

; labourer was worthy of his hire, and that the de 

of years to literature should have been met with some moderate 

: of the usual form of recognition which the world accords to 

a 1820 he spe- the whole of my 

returns from the v 

pounds ; :: and as late - I of his fame, he 

was not ashamed of confessing the importance which he had al- 
ined to t: ar. 

;ble am I," he says, "of the deficiencies in all 
:nd so far does everything that I attempt fall short of what 
it to be. tha: vte publication, if such a term may 

be allowed, requires more resolution than I can command. I have 
written to give vent to my own mind, and not without hope that, 
some time or other, kindred minds might be my labours ; 

but I am inclined to believe I should never have ventured- to send 
forth 1 of mine to the world, if it had not been done on 

the pre personal occasions. Had I been a rich man. my 

productions, like this EpistU. the Tragedy of the Borderers, &c, 
would most likely have been confined to manuscript." 

m an unpublished letter of 
rth's on die Ijoe of Rylstone, confirms this state- 

I brother was very much pleased with your frankness in telling us 
1 did not perfectly like his poem. He wishes to know what your 
3 were — whether the tale itself did not interest yon — or whether 
yon could not enter into the conception of Emily's char <t de- 

:hat visionary communion which is supposed to have existed be- 
tween her and the Doe. Do not fear to give him pain. He is I 
much accustomed to be abased to receive pain from it (at least 2s far as 
he himself is concerne" king yon these questions is, 

that some of our friends, who are equal admirers of the White Dee and 
of my brother's published poems, think that this p*iem will sell on ac- 
count of the story ; that is. that the story will bear up those points which 
are above the level of the public taste ;' whereas, the two last volumes — 
except by a few solitary individuals, who are passionately devoted to my 
— ■ 



7 o WORDS IVOR Til, 

" Now, as his sole object in publishing this poem at present would be 
for the sake of the money, he would not publish it if he did not think, 
from the several judgments of his friends, that it would be likely to have 
a sale. He has no pleasure in publishing — he even detests it ; and if 
it were not that he is not over-wealthy, he would leave all his works to be 
published after his death. William himself is sure that the White Doe 
will not sell or be admired, except by a very few, at first ; and only yields 
to Mary's entreaties and mine. We are determined, however, if we are 
deceived this time, to let him have his own way in future." 

These passages must be taken, no doubt, as representing one 
aspect only of the poet's impulses in the matter. With his deep 
conviction of the world's real, though unrecognised, need of a pure 
vein of poetry, we can hardly imagine him as permanently satisfied 
to defer his own contribution till after his death. Yet we may 
certainly believe that the need of money helped him to overcome 
much diffidence as to publication ; and we may discern something 
dignified in his frank avowal of this when it is taken in connexion 
with his scrupulous abstinence from any attempt to win the 
suffrages of the multitude by means unworthy of his high vocation. 
He could never, indeed, have written poems which could have vied 
in immediate popularity with those of Byron or Scott. But the 
criticisms on the first edition of the Lyrical Ballads must have 
shown him that a slight alteration of method — nay, even the ex- 
cision of a few pages in each volume, pages certain to be loudly 
objected to — would have made a marked difference in the sale and 
its proceeds. From this point of view, even poems which we may 
now feel to have been needlessly puerile and grotesque acquire a 
certain impressiveness, when we recognise that the theory which 
demanded their composition was one which their author was 
willing to uphold at the cost of some years of real physical priva- 
tion, and of the postponement for a generation of his legitimate 
fame. 



WORDSWORTH. 



7» 



CHAPTER IX. 

POETICAL DICTION. — "LAODAMIA." — "EVENING ODE." 

The Excursion appeared in 1814, and in the course of the next 
year Wordsworth republished his minor poems, so arranged as to 
indicate the faculty of the mind which he considered to have been 
predominant in the composition of each. To most readers this 
disposition has always seemed somewhat arbitrary ; and it was once 
suggested to Wordsworth that a chronological arrangement would 
be better. The manner in which Wordsworth met this proposal 
indicated the limit of his absorption in himself — his real desire only 
to dwell on his own feelings in such a way as might make them 
useful to others. For he rejected the plan as too egoistical — as 
emphasizing the succession of moods in the poet's mind, rather 
than the lessons which those moods could teach. His objection 
points, at any rate, to a real danger which any man's simplicity of 
character incurs by dwelling too attentively on the changing phases 
of his own thought. But after the writer's death the historical 
spirit will demand that poems, like other artistic products, should 
be disposed for the most part in the order of time. 

In a preface to this edition of 1815, and a supplementary essay, 
he developed the theory on poetry already set forth in a well-known 
preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. Much of 
the matter of these essays, received at the time with contemptuous 
aversion, is now accepted as truth ; and few compositions of equal 
length contains so much of vigorous criticism and sound reflection. 
It is only when they generalise too confidently that they are in 
danger of misleading us ; for all expositions of the art and practice 
of poetry must necessarily be incomplete. Poetry, like all the arts, 
is essentially a " mystery." Its charm depends upon qualities 
which we can neither define accurately, nor reduce to rule, nor 
create again at pleasure. Mankind, however, are unwilling to 
admit this ; and they endeavour from time to time to persuade 
themselves that they have discovered the rules which will enable 
them to produce the desired effect. And so much of the effect 
can thus be reproduced, that it is often possible to believe for a 
time that the problem has been solved. Pope, to take the instance 
which was prominent in Wordsworth's mind, was by general ad- 
mission a poet. But his success seemed to depend on imitable 
peculiarities ; and Pope's imitators were so like Pope that it wai 



72 



WORDSWORTH. 



hard to draw a line and say where they ceased to be poets. At 
last, however, this imitative school began to prove too much. If 
all the insipid verses which they wrote were poetry, what was the 
use of writing poetry at all ? A reaction succeeded, which asserted 
that poetry depends on emotion, and not on polish ; that it con- 
sists precisely in those things which frigid imitators lack. Cowper, 
Burns, and Crabbe (especially in his Sir Eustace Grey) had pre- 
ceded Wordsworth as leaders of this reaction. But they had acted 
half unconsciously, or had even at times themselves attempted to 
copy the very style which they were superseding. 

Wordsworth, too, began with a tendency to imitate Pope, but 
only in the school exercises which he wrote as a boy. Poetry 
soon became to him the expression of his own deep and simple 
feelings; and then he rebelled against rhetoric and unreality, and 
found for himself a directer and truer voice. " I have proposed to 
myself to imitate and, as far as is possible, to adopt the very lan- 
guage of men. ... I have taken as much pains to avoid what is 
usually called poetic diction as others ordinarily take to produce 
it.-' And he erected this practice into a general principle in the 
following passage : 

" I do not doubt that it may be safely affirmed that there neither is, 
nor can be, any essential difference between the language of prose and 
metrical composition. We are fond of tracing the resemblance between 
poetry and painting, and accordingly we call them sisters ; but where shall 
we find bonds of connexion sufficiently strict to typify the affinity between 
metrical and prose composition ? If it be affirmed that rhyme and met- 
rical arrangement of themselves constitute a distinction which overturns 
what I have been saying on the strict affinity of metrical language with 
that of prose, and paves the way for other artificial distinctions which the 
mind voluntarily admits, I answer that the language of such poetry as I 
am recommending is, as far as possible, a selection of the language really 
spoken by men ; that this selection, wherever it is made with true taste 
and feeling, will of itself form a distinction far greater than would at first 
be imagined, and will entirely separate the composition from the vulgarity 
and meanness of ordinary life ; and if metre he superadded thereto, I be- 
lieve that a dissimilitude will be produced altogether sufficient for the 
gratification of a rational mind. What other distinction would we have ? 
whence is it to come ? and where is it to exist ? " 

There is a definiteness and simplicity about this description of 
poetry which may well make us wonder why this precious thing 
(producible, apparently, as easily as Pope's imitators supposed, al- 
though by means different from theirs) is not offered to us by more 
persons, and of better quality. And it will not be hard to show 
that a good poetical style must possess certain characteristics 
which, although something like them must exist in a good prose 
style, are carried in poetry to a pitch so much higher as virtually 
to need a specific faculty for their successful production. 

To illustrate the inadequacy of Wordsworth's theory to explain 
the merits of his own poetry, I select a stanza from one of his sim- 
plest and most characteristic poems, The Affliction of Margaret : 



WORDS IVOR Til. J 3 

" Perhaps some dungeon hears thee groan, 
Maimed, mangled by inhuman men, 
Or thou upon a Desert thrown 
Inheritest the lion's Den ; 
Or hast been summoned to the Deep, 
Thou, thou and all thy mates, to keep 
An incommunicable sleep." 

These lines, supposed to be uttered by " a poor widow at Pen- 
rith,'' afford a fair illustration of what Wordsworth calls "the lan- 
guage really spoken by men," with "metre superadded." "What 
other distinction from prose," he asks, " would we have ? " We 
may answer that we would have what he has actually given us, viz., 
an appropriate and attractive music, lying both on the rhythm ant* 
in the actual sound of the words used — a music whose complexity 
may be indicated here by drawing out some of its elements in d# 
tail, at the risk of appearing pedantic and technical. We observe 
then, (a), that the general movement of the lines is unusually slow. 
They contain a very large proportion of strong accents and long 
vowels, to suit the tone of deep and despairing sorrow. In six 
places only out of twenty-eight is the accent weak where it might 
be expected to be strong (in the second syllable, namely, of the 
iambic foot), and in each of these cases the omission of a possible 
accent throws greater weight on the next succeeding accent — on 
the accents, that is to say, contained in the words inhuman, desert, 
lion, summoned, deep, and sleep, {b) The first four lines contain 
subtle alliterations of the letters d, h, m, and th. In this connex- 
ion it should be remembered that when consonants are thus re- 
peated at the beginning of syllables, those syllables need not be at 
the beginning of words ; and' further, that repetitions scarcely more 
numerous than chance alone would have occasioned may be so 
placed by the poet as to produce a strongly-felt effect. If anyone 
doubts the effectiveness of the unobvious alliterations here insisted 
on, let him read ( i) " jungle " for " desert," (2) " maybe " for " per- 
haps," (3) "tortured " for "mangled," (4) "blown" for "thrown," 
and he will become sensible of the lack of the metrical support 
which the existing consonants give one another. The three last 
lines contain one or two similar alliterations on which I need not 
dwell, (c) The words inheritest and siwimoned are by no means 
such as " a poor widow," even at Penrith, would employ ; they are 
used to intensify the imagined relation which connects the missing 
man with (1) the wild beasts who surround him, and (2) the invisi- 
ble Power which leads ; so that something mysterious and awful is 
added to his fate, (d) This impression is heightened by the use of 
the word incommujiicable in an unusual sense, " incapable of being 
communicated with," instead of "incapable of being communi- 
cated ; " while '(e) the expression " to keep an incommunicable 
sleep " for " to lie dead," gives dignity to the occasion by carrying, 
the mind back along a train of literary associations of which the 
xveV-known cLTepnova vriyperov imvov ot Moschus may be taken as the 
type. 



74 



WORDSWORTH. 



We must not, of course, suppose that Wordsworth consciously 
sought these alliterations, arranged these accents, resolved to in- 
troduce an unusual word in the last line, or hunted for a classical 
allusion. But what the poet's brain does not do consciously it 
does unconsciously ; a selective action is going on in its recesses 
simultaneously with the overt train of thought, and on the degree of 
this unconscious suggestiveness the richness and melody of the 
poetry will depend. 

No rules can secure the attainment of these effects ; and the 
very same artifices which are delightful when used by one man 
seem mechanical and offensive when used by another. Nor is it 
by any means always the case that the man who can most deli- 
cately appreciate the melody of the poetry of others will be able to 
produce similar melody himself. Nay, even if he can produce it 
one year, it by no means follows that he will be able to produce it 
the next. Of all qualifications for writing poetry this inventive 
music is the most arbitrarily distributed, and the most evanescent. 
But it is the more important to dwell on its necessity, inasmuch as 
both good and bad poets are tempted to ignore it. The good poet 
prefers to ascribe his success to higher qualities ; to his imagina- 
tion, elevation of thought, descriptive faculty. The bad poet can 
more easily urge that his thoughts a r e too advanced for mankind to 
appreciate than that his melody is too sweet for their ears to catch. 
And when the gift vanishes no poet is willing to confess that it is 
gone ; so humiliating is it to lose power over mankind by the loss 
of something which seems quite independent of intellect or char- 
acter. And yet so it is. For some twenty years at most (1798- 
181 8) Wordsworth possessed this gift of melody. During those 
years he wrote works which profoundly influenced mankind. The 
gift then left him; he continued as wise and as earnest as ever, 
but his poems had no longer any potency, nor his existence much 
public importance. 

Humiliating as such reflections hay seem, they are in accord- 
ance with actual experience in r- 1 ! branches of art. The fact is 
that the pleasures which art gives us are complex in the extreme. 
We are always disposed to dweM on such of their elements as are 
explicable, and can in some w?y be traced to moral or intellectual 
sources. But they contain also other elements which are inexplic- 
able, non-moral, and non-inHlectual,and which render most of our 
attempted explanations of artistic merit so incomplete as to be 
practically misleading. Among such incomplete explanations 
Wordsworth's essays must certainly be ranked. It would not be 
safe for any man to believe that he had produced true poetry be- 
cause he had fulfilled the conditions which Wordsworth lays down. 
But the essays effected what is perhaps as much as the writer on 
art can fairly hope to accomplish. They placed in a striking light 
that side of tiie subject which had been too long ignored ; they 
aided in recalling an art which had become conventional and fan- 
tastic into the normal current of English thought and speech. 
It may be added that, both in doctrine and practice, Words- 



WORDSWORTH. 75 

worth exhibits a progressive reaction from the extreme views with 
which he starts towards that common vein of good sense and sound 
judgment which may be traced back to Horace, Longinus, and 
Aristotle. His first preface is violently polemic. He attacks with 
reason that conception of the sublime and beautiful which is rep- 
resented by Dryden's picture of " Cortes alone in his night-gown," 
remarking that "the mountains seem to nod their drowsy heads." 
But tiie only example of true poetry which he sees fit to adduce 
in contrast consists in a stanza from the Babes in the Wood. In 
his preface of I Si 5 he is not less severe on false sentiment and 
false observation. But his views of the complexity and dignity of 
poetry have been much developed, and he is willing now to draw 
his favourable instances from Shakspeare, Milton, Virgil, and 
himself. 

His own practice underwent a corresponding change. It is 
only to a few poems of his earlier years that the famous parody of 
the Rejected Addresses fairly applies — 

" My father's walls are made of brick, 
But not so tall and not so thick 

As these ; and goodness me ! 
My father's beams are made of wood, 
But never, never half so good 

As those that now I see ! " 

Lines something like these might have occurred in The Thorn or 
The Idiot Boy. Nothing could be more different from the style of 
the sonnets, or of the Ode to Duty, or of Laodamia. And yet both 
the simplicity of the earlier and the pomp of the later poems were 
almost always noble ; nor is the transition from the one style to 
the other a perplexing or abnormal thing. For all sincere styles 
are congruous to one another, whether they be adorned or no, as 
all high natures are congruous to one another, whether in the garb 
of peasant or of prince. What is incongruous to both is affecta- 
tion, vulgarity, egoism ; and while the noble style can be inter- 
changeably childlike or magnificent, as its theme requires, the 
ignoble can neither simplify itself into purity nor deck itself into 
grandeur. 

It need not, therefore, surprise us to find the classical models 
becoming more and more dominant in Wordsworth's mind, till the 
poet of Poor Susan and The Cuckoo spends months over the at- 
tempt to translate the JZneid— to win the secret of that style which 
he placed at the head of all poetic styles, and of those verses which 
" wind," as he says, "with the majesty of the Conscript Fathers 
entering the Senate-house in solemn possession," and enveloped in 
their imperial melancholy all the sorrows and the fates of man. 

And, indeed, so tranquil and uniform was the life which we are 
now retracing, and at the same time so receptive of any noble in- 
fluence which opportunity might bring, that a real epoch is marked 
in Wordsworth's poetical career by the mere rereading of some 
Latin authors in 1814-16 with a view to preparing his eldest son 



^6 WORDSWORTH. 

for the University. Among the poets whom he thus studied was 
one in whom he might seem to discern his own spirit endowed 
with grander proportions, and meditating on sadder fates. Among 
the poets of the battlefield, of the study, of the boudoir, he en- 
countered the first Priest of Nature, the first poet in Europe who 
had deliberately shunned the life of courts and cities for the mere 
joy in Nature's presence, for "sweet Parthenope and the fields 
beside Vesevus' hill." 

There are, indeed, passages in the Georgics so Wordsworthian, 
as we now call it, in tone, that it is hard to realise what centuries 
separated them from the Sonnet to Lady Beaumont ox from Ruth. 
Such, for instance, is the, picture of the Corycian old man, who had 
made himself independent of the seasons by his gardening skill, so 
that " when gloomy winter was still rending the stones with frost, 
still curbing with ice the rivers' onward flow, he even then was 
plucking the soft hyacinth's bloom, and chid the tardy summer and 
delaying airs of spring." Such, again, is the passage where the 
poet breaks from the glories of successful industry into the delight 
of watching the great processes which nature accomplishes untu- 
tored and alone, " the joy of gazing on Cytorus waving with box- 
wood, and on forests of Narycian pine, on tracts that never felt 
the harrow, nor knew the care of man." 

Such thoughts as these the Roman and the English poet had 
in common — the heritage of untarnished souls. 

" I asked ; 'twas whispered : The device 
To each and all might well belong : 
It is the Spirit of Paradise 
That prompts such work, a Spirit strong, 
That gives to all the self-same bent 
Where life is wise and innocent." 

It is not only in tenderness but in dignity that the " wise and 
innocent" are wont to be at one. Strong in tranquillity, they can 
intervene amid great emotions with a master's voice, and project 
on the storm of passion the clear light of their unchanging calm. 
And thus it was that the study of Virgil, and especially of Virgil's 
solemn picture of the Underworld, prompted in Wordsworth's 
mind the most majestic of his poems, his one great utterance on 
heroic love. 

He had as yet written little on any such topic as this. At 
Goslar he had composed the poems on Lucy to which allusion has 
already been made. And after his happy marriage he had painted 
in one of the best known of his poems the sweet transitions of wed- 
ded love, as it moves on from the first shock and agitation of the 
encounter of predestined souls through all tendernesses of inti- 
mate affection into a pervading permanency and calm. Scattered, 
moreover, throughout his poems are several passages in which the 
passion is treated with similar force and truth. The poem which 
begins " 'Tis said that some have died for love " depicts the endur- 
ing poignancy of bereavement with an " iron pathos " that is al- 



WORDSWORTH. yy 

most too strong for art. And something of the same power of 
clinging attachment is shown in the sonnet where the poet is stung 
with the thought that "even for the least division of an hour" he 
has taken pleasure in the life around him, without the accustomed 
tacit reference to one who has passed away. There is a brighter 
touch of constancy in that other sonnet where, after letting his 
fancy play over a glad imaginary past, he turns to his wife, ashamed 
that even in so vague a vision he could have shaped for himself x 
solitary joy : 

" Let her be comprehended in the frame 
Of these illusions, or they please no more." 

In later years the two sonnets on his wife's picture set on that 
love the consecration of faithful age ; and there are those who can 
recall his look as he gazed on the picture and tried to recognise in 
that aged face the Beloved who to him was ever young and fair — a 
look as of one dwelling in life-long affections with the unquestion- 
ing single-heartedness of a child, 

And here it might have been thought that as his experience 
ended, his power of description would have ended too. But it was 
not so. Under the powerful stimulus of the sixth AZneid — allusions 
to which pervade Laodamia* throughout — with unusual labour, and 
by a strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled 
to depict his own love in excelsis, to imagine what aspect it might 
have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic 
call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to 
be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, 
indeed, the " fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal 
that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affec- 
tion which we have been considering in domesticity and peace ; it is 
love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation ; as a 
self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law; no longer as 
an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul. It is 
that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto 
of Dante's Purgatory — which finds in English chivalry a noble 
voice — 

" I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
Loved I not honour more." 

For, indeed (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of 
Truth), so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue ; it is the 
unexpected spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it is 
man's standing evidence that he " must lose himself to find him- 
self," and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from 
around him can he recognise that he is already in heaven. 

In a second poem inspired by this revived study of classical 

* Laodamia should be read (as it is given in Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume 
of selections) with the earlier conclusion : the second form is less satisfactory ; and the 
third, with its sermonising tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and reproved," is worst of 
all. 



7 8 WORDS IVOR TIT. 

antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion — the worthy 
pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed him- 
self to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was 
haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion 
was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate 
seem tome to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with 
a touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a 
deliverer, and has its strength in the unseen — 

So were the hopeless troubles, that involve 1 
The soul of Dion, instantly dissolved." 

I can only compare these lines to that famous passage of Sophocles 
where the lamentations of the dying CEdipus are interrupted by the 
impatient summons of an unseen accompanying god. In both 
places the effect is the same — to present to us with striking brevity 
the contrast between the visible and the invisible presences that 
may stand about a man's last hour ; for he may feel with the deso- 
late CEdipus that "all I am has perished " — he may sink like Dion 
through inextricable sadness to a disastrous death, and then in a 
moment the transitory shall disappear and the essential shall be 
made plain, and from Dion's upright spirit the perplexities shall 
vanish away, and CEdipus, in the welcome of that unknown com- 
panionship, shall find his expiations over and his reward begun. 

It is true, no doubt, that when Wordsworth wrote these poems 
he had lost something of the young inimitable charm which fills 
such pieces as the Fountain or the Solitary Reader. His lan- 
guage is majestic, but it is no longer magical. And yet we cannot 
but feel that he has put into these poems something which he could 
not have put into the poems which preceded them; that they bear 
the impress of a soul which has added moral effort to poetic in- 
spiration, and is mistress now of the acquired as well as of the in- 
nate virtue. For it is words like these that are the strength and 
stay of men ; nor can their accent of lofty earnestness be simulated 
by the writer's art. Literary skill may deceive the reader who 
seeks a literary pleasure alone ; and he to whom these strong con- 
solations are a mere imaginative luxury may be uncertain or indif- 
ferent out of what heart they come. But those who need them 
know ; spirits that hunger after righteousness discern their proper 
food; there is no fear lest they confound the sentimental and su- 
perficial with those weighty utterances of moral truth which are the 
most precious legacy that a man can leave to mankind. 

Thus far, then, I must hold that, although much of grace had 
already vanished, there was on the whole a progress and elevation 
in the mind of him of whom we treat. But the culminating point 
is here. After this — whatever ripening process may have been at 
work unseen — what is chiefly visible is the slow stiffening of the 
imaginative power, the slow withdrawal of the insight into the soul 
of things, and a descent — i/3ATjxpb? ixd\o. toZo?- 
to the euthanasy of a death that was like sleep. 



WORDS WOR TH. j g 

The impression produced by Wordsworth's reperusal of Virgil 
in 1814-16 was a deep and lasting one. In 1829-30 he devoted 
much time and labour to a translation of the first three books of 
the AZueid, and it is interesting to note the gradual modification of 
his views as to the true method of rendering poetry. 

" I have long been persuaded," he writes to Lord Lonsdale in 
1829, "that Milton formed his blank verse upon the model of the 
Geo?gics and the AZneid, and I am so much struck with this re- 
semblance, that I should have attempted Virgil in blank verse, had 
I not been persuaded that no ancient author can with advantage be 
so rendered. Their religion, their warfare, their course of action 
and feeling are too remote from modern interest to allow it. We 
require every possible help and attraction of sound in our language 
to smooth the way for the admission of things so remote from our 
present concerns. My own notion of translation is, that it cannot 
be too literal, provided these faults be avoided : baldness, in which 
1 include all that takes from dignity ; and strangeness, or uncouth- 
ness, including harshness ; and lastly, attempts to convey meanings, 
which, as they cannot be given but by languid circumlocutions, 
cannot in fact be said to be given at all. ... I feel it, however, 
to be too probable that my translation is deficient in ornament, be- 
cause I must unavoidably have lost many of Virgil's, and have 
never without reluctance attempted a compensation of mv own." 

The truth of this last self-criticism is very apparent from the 
fragments of the translation which were published in the Philologi- 
cal Museum ; and Coleridge, to whom the whole manuscript was 
submitted, justly complains of finding " page after page without a 
single brilliant note ; " and adds, " Finally, my conviction is that 
you undertake an impossibility, and that there is no medium be- 
tween a pure version and one on the avowed principle of compen- 
sation in the widest sense, i.e., manner, genius, total effect; I con- 
fine myself to Virgil when I say this." And it appears that Words- 
worth himself came round to this view, for, reluctantly sending a 
specimen of his work to the Philological Museum in 1832, he says ; 

" Having been displeased in modern translations with the additions of 
incongruous matter, I began to translate with a resolve to fceep clear of 
that fault by adding nothing : but I became convinced t&at a spirited trans- 
lation can scarcely be accomplished in the English language without ad- 
mitting a principle of compensation." 

There is a curious analogy between the experiences of Cow-per 
and Wordsworth in the way of translation. Wordsworth's trans- 
lation of Virgil was prompted by the same kind of reaction against 
the reckless laxity of Dryden as that which inspired Cowper against] 
the distorting artificiality of Pope. In each case the pew translator 
cared more for his author, and took a much higher view of a trans- 
lator's duty, than his predecessor had done, But in each case |be 
plain and accurate translation was a failure, while the ioose and 
ornate one continued to be admired. We need not conclude from 



8 o WORDS IVOR TH. 

this that the wilful inaccuracy of Pope or Dryden would be any 
longer excusable in such a work. But on the other hand, we may 
certainly feel that nothing is gained by rendering an ancient poet 
into verse at all unless that verse be of a quality to give a pleasure 
independent of the faithfulness of the translation which it conveys. 
The translations and Laodamia are not the only indications of 
the influence which Virgil exercised over Wordsworth. Whether 
from mere similarity of feeling, or from more or less conscious 
recollection, there are frequent passages in the English which re- 
call the Roman poet. Who can hear Wordsworth describe how a 
poet on the island in Grasmere 

" At noon 

Spreads out his limbs, while, yet unshorn, the sheep, 

Panting beneath the burthen of their wool, 

Lie round him, even as if they were a part 

Of his own household " — 

and not think of the stately tenderness of Virgil's 

" Stant et oves circum ; nostri nee poenitet illas," 

and the flocks of Arcady that gather round in sympathy with the 
lovelorn Gallus' woe ? 

So, again, the well-known lines — 

" Not seldom, clad in radiant vest, 
Deceitfully goes forth the Morn 
Not seldom Evening in the west 
Sinks smilingly forsworn " — 

are almost a translation of Palinurus' remonstrance with " the 
treachery of tranquil heaven." And when the poet wishes for any 
link which could bind him closer to the Highland maiden who has 
flitted across his path as a being of a different world from his own— 

" Thine elder Brother would I be, 
Thy Father, anything to thee ! " — 

we hear the echo of the sadder plaint — 

" Atque utinam e vobis unus ' - 

when the Roman statesman longs to be made one with the simple 
life of shepherd or husbandman, and to know their undistracted 

joy- 
Still more impressive is the shock of surprise with which we 
read in Wordsworth's poem on Ossian the following lines : 

" Musaeus, stationed with his lyre 
Supreme among the Elysian quire, 
Is, for the dwellers upon earth, 
Mute as a lark ere morning's birth," 

and perceive that he who wrote them has entered — where no com- 
mentator could conduct him — into the solemn pathos of Virgil's 
Musccum ante oimiis ; where the singer whose very existence upon 
earth has become a legend and a mythic name is, seen keeping in 



WORDS WOK TH. 8 Y 

the underworld his old pre-eminence, and towering aoove the 
blessed dead. 

This is a stage in Wordsworth's career on which his biographer 
is tempted unduly to linger. For we have reached the Indian sum- 
mer of his genius ; it can still shine at moments bright as ever, 
and with even a new majesty and calm; but we feel, nevertheless, 
that the melody is dying from his song; that he is hardening into 
self-repetition, into rhetoric, into sermonising common-place, and 
is rigid where he was once profound. The Thanksgiving Ode 
(181O) strikes death to the lieart. The accustomed patriotic senti- 
ments — the accustomed virtuous aspirations — these are still there ; 
but the accent is like that of a ghost who calls to us in hollow- 
mimicry of a voice that once we loved. 

And yet Wordsworth's poetic life was not to close without a great 
symbolical spectacle, a solemn farewell. Sunset among the Cum- 
brian hills, often of remarkable beauty, once or twice, perhaps, in a 
score of years, reaches a pitch of illusion and magnificence which 
indeed seems nothing less than the commingling of earth and 
heaven. Such a sight— seen from Rydal Mount in 181S — afforded 
once more the needed stimulus, and evoked that "Evening Ode- 
composed on an evening of extraordinary splendour and beauty" 
which is the last considerable production of Wordsworth's genius. 
In this ode we recognise the peculiar gift of reproducing with magi- 
cal simplicity, as it were, the inmost virtue of natural phenomena. 

" No sound is uttered, but a deep 

And solemn harmony pervades 
The hollow vale from steep to steep, 

And penetrates the glades. 
Far distant images draw nigh, 
Called forth by wondrous potency 
Of beamy radiance, that imbues 
Whate'er it strikes, with gem-like hues! 

In vision exquisitely clear 
Herds range along the mountain side \ 
And glistening antlers are descried, 

And gilded flocks appear." 

Once more the poet brings home to us that sense of belonging 
at once to two worlds, which gives to human life so much of mys- 
terious solemnity. 

" Wings at my shoulder seem to play; 
But, rooted here, I stand and gaze 
On those bright steps that heavenward raise 
Their practicable way." 

And the poem ends — with a deep personal pathos — in an allusion, 
repeated from the Ode on Immortality, to the light which " lay about 
him in his infancy" — the light 



82 WORDSWORTH. 

'• Full early lost, and fruitlessly deplored ; 

Which at this moment, on my waking sight 
Appears to shine, by miracle restored ! 

My soul, though yet confined to earth, 
Rejoices in a second birth ; 
— Tis past, the visionary splendour fades 
And night approaches with her shades." 

For those to whom the mission of Wordsworth appears before 
all things as a religious one there is something solemn in the spec- 
tacle of the seer standing at the close of his own apocalypse, with 
the consciousness that the stiffening brain would never permit him 
to drink again that overflowing sense of glory and revelation— 
never, till he should drink it new in the kingdom of God. He lived, 
in fact, through another generation of men, but the vision came to 
him no more ; 

" Or if some vestige of those gleams 
Survived, 'twas only in his dreams." 

We look on a man's life for the most part as forming in itself a 
completed drama. We love to see the interest maintained to the 
close, the pathos deepened at the departing hour. To die on the 
same day is the prayer of lovers; to vanish at Trafalgar is the 
ideal of heroic souls. And yet — so wide and various are the issues 
of life — there is a solemnity as profound in a quite different lot ; 
for if we are moving among eternal emotions we should have time 
to bear witness that they are eternal. Even Love left desolate 
may feel with a proud triumph that it could never have rooted 
itself so immutably amid the joys of a visible return as it can do 
through the constancies of bereavement, and the life-long memory 
which is a life-long hope. And Vision, Revelation, Ecstasy — it is 
not only while these are kindling our way that we should speak of 
them to men, but rather when they have passed from us and left us 
only their record in our souls, whose permanence confirms the fiery 
finger which wrote it long ago. For as the Greeks would end the 
first drama of a trilogy witha hush of concentration, and with de- 
clining notes of calm, so to us the narrowing receptivity and per- 
sistent steadfastness of age suggest not only decay but expectancy, 
and not death so much as sleep ; or seem, t as it were, the beginning 
of operations which are not measured by our hurrying time, nor 
tested by any achievement to be accomplished here. 



WORDS IVOR TH. 8 3 



CHAPTER X. 

NATURAL RELIGION. 

It will have been obvious from the preceding pages, as well 
as from the tone of other criticisms on Wordsworth, that his ex- 
ponents are not content to treat his poems on nature simply as 
graceful descriptive pieces, but speak of him in terms usually re- 
served for the originators of some great religious movement. " The 
very image of Wordsworth," says De Ouincey, for instance, " as I 
prefigured it to my own planet-struck eye, crushed my faculties as 
before Elijah or St. Paul." How was it that poems so simple in 
outward form that the reviewers of the day classed them with the 
Song of Sixpence, or at best with the Babes in the Wodd, could 
affect a critic like De Ouincey — I do not say with admiration, but 
with this exceptional sense of revelation and awe ? 

The explanation of this anomaly lies, as is well known, in some- 
thing new and individual in the way in which Wordsworth regarded 
nature ; something more or less discernible in most of his works, 
and redeeming even some of the slightest of them from insignifi- 
cance, while conferring on the more serious and sustained pieces 
an importance of a different order from that which attaches to even 
the most brilliant productions of his contemporaries. To define 
with exactness, however, what was this new element imported by 
our poet into man's view of nature is far from easy, and requires 
some brief consideration of the attitude in this respect of his pre- 
decessors. 

There is so much in the external world which is terrible or un- 
friendly to man, that the first impression made on him by Nature 
as a whole, even in temperate climates, is usually that of awfulness ; 
his admiration being reserved for the fragments of her which he 
has utilised for his own purposes, or adorned with his own handi- 
work. When Homer tells us of a place 

" Where even a god might gaze, and stand apart, 
And feel a wondering rapture at the heart," 

it is of no prospect of sea or mountain that he is speaking, but of a 
garden where everything is planted in rows, and there is a never- 
ending succession of pears and figs. These gentler aspects of 



84 WORDSWORTH. 

nature will have their minor deities to represent them ; but the 
men, of whatever race they be, whose minds are most absorbed in 
the problems of man's position and destiny will tend for the most 
part to some sterner and more overwhelming conception of the 
sum of things. " Lord, what is man, that thou art mindful of 
him ? " is the cry of Hebrew piety as well as of modern science ; 
and the " majestas cognita rerum " — the recognised majesty of the 
universe — teaches Lucretius only the indifference of gods and the 
misery of men. 

But in a well-known passage, in which Lucretius is honoured as 
he deserves, we rind, nevertheless, a different view hinted, with an 
impressiveness which it had hardly acquired till then. We find 
Virgil implying that scientific knowledge of Nature may not be the 
only way of arriving at the truth about her; that her loveliness is 
also a revelation, and that the soul which is in unison with her 
is justified by its own peace. This is the very substance of The 
Poet's Epiiaph also ; of the poem in which Wordsworth at the be- 
ginning of his career describes himself as he continued till its close 
— the poet who " murmurs near the running brooks a music sweeter 
than their own " — who scorns the man of science " who would 
peep and botanise upon his mother's grave." 

" The outward shows of sky and earth, 
Of hill and valley, he has viewed ; 
And impulses of deeper birth 
Have come to him in solitude. 

" In common things that round us lie 
Sortie random truths he can impart — 
The harvest of a quiet eye 

That broods and sleeps on his own heart. 

" But he is weak, both man and boy, 
Hath been an idler in the land ; 
Contented if he might enjoy 

The things which others understand." 

Like much else in the literature of imperial Rome, the passage 
in the second Georgic, to which I have referred, is in its essence 
more modern than the Middle Ages. Mediaeval Christianity in- 
volved a divorce from the nature around us, as well as from the 
nature within. With the rise of modern spirit delight in the ex- 
ternal world returns ; and from Chaucer downwards through the 
whole course of English poetry are scattered indications of a mood 
which draws from visible things an intuition of things not seen. 
When Withers, in words which Wordsworth has fondly quoted, 
says of his muse : 

" By the murmur of a spring, 
Or the least bough's rustelling ; 
By a daisy whose leaves spread, 
Shut when Titan goes to bed ; 



WORDS IVOR TH. 8 5 

Or a shady bush or tree — 
She could more infuse in me 
Than all Nature's beauties can 
In some other wiser man " — 

lie felt already, as Wordsworth after him, that Nature is no mere 
collection of phenomena, but infuses into her least approaches some 
sense of her mysterious whole. 

Passages like this, however, must not be too closely pressed. 
The mystic element in English literature has run for the most part 
into other channels ; and when, after Pope's reign of artificiality and 
convention, attention was redirected to the phenomena of Nature 
by Collins, Beattie, Thomson, Crabbe, Cowper, Burns, and Scott, 
it was in a spirit of admiring observation rather than of an intimate 
worship. Sometimes, as for the most part in Thomson, we have 
mere picturesqueness — a reproduction of Nature for the mere 
pleasure of reproducing her — a kind of stock-taking of her habitual 
effects. Or sometimes, as in Burns, we have a glowing spirit which 
looks on Nature with a side glance, and uses her as an accessory 
to the expression of human love and woe. Cowper sometimes con- 
templated her as a whole, but only as affording a proof of the wis- 
dom and goodness of a personal Creator. 

To express what is characteristic in Wordsworth we must recur 
to a more generalised conception of the relations between the nat- 
ural and the spiritual worlds. We must say with Plato — the law- 
giver of all subsequent idealists — that the unknown realities around 
us, which the philosopher apprehends by the contemplation of ab- 
stract truth, become in various ways obscurely perceptible to men 
under the influence of "divine madness" — of an enthusiasm which 
is in fact inspiration. And further, giving, as he so often does, a 
half -fanciful expression to a substance of deep meaning, Plato dis- 
tinguishes four kinds of this enthusiasm. There is the prophet's 
glow of revelation ; ard the prevailing prayer which averts the 
wrath of heaven ; and that philosophy which enters, so to say, un- 
awares into the poet through his art, and into the lover through his 
love. Each of these stimuli may so exalt the inward faculties as 
to make a man e ve e os k^Zk^v — ''bereft of reason, but filled with 
divinity " — percipient of an intelligence other and larger than his 
own. To this list Wordsworth has made an important addition. 
He has shown by his example and writings that the contemplation 
of Nature may become a stimulus as inspiring as these;, may en- 
able us " to see into the life of things " — as far, perhaps, as beatific 
vision or prophetic rapture can attain. Assertions so impalpable as 
these must justify themselves by subjective evidence. He who 
claims to give a message must satisfy us that he has himself re- 
ceived it ; and, inasmuch as transcendent things are in themselves 
inexpressible, he must convey to us in hints and figures the con- 
viction which we need. Prayer may bring the spiritual world near 
to us; but when the eyes of the kneeling Dominic seem to say 
" Io son venuto a questo" their look must persuade us that the 



86 WORDSWORTH. 

life of worship has indeed attained the reward of vision. Art, too, 
may be inspired ; but the artist, in whatever field he works, must 
have " such a mastery of his mystery " that the fabric of his im- 
agination stands visible in its own light before our eyes — 

" Seeing it is built 
Of music ; therefore never built at all, 
And therefore built for ever." 

Love may open heaven; but when the lover would invite us 
" thither, where are the eyes of Beatrice," he must make us feel 
that his individual passion is indeed part and parcel of that love 
" which moves the sun and the other stars." 

And so also with Wordsworth. Unless the words which de- 
scribe the intense and sympathetic gaze with which he contemplates 
Nature convince us of the reality of "the light which never was on 
sea or land " — of the "Presence which disturbs him with the joy 
of elevated thoughts " — of the authentic vision of those hours 

" When the light of sense 
Goes out, but with a flash that has revealed 
The invisible world ; " 

unless his tone awakes a responsive conviction in ourselves, there 
is no argument by which he can prove to us that he is offering a 
new insight to mankind. Yet, on the other hand, it need not be 
unreasonable to see in his message something more than a mere 
individual fancy. It seems, at least, to be closely correlated with 
those other messages of which we have spoken — those other cases 
where some original element of our nature is capable of being re- 
garded as an inlet of mystic truth. For in each of these complex 
aspects of religion we see, perhaps, the modification of a primeval 
instinct. There is a point of view from which Revelation seems to 
be but transfigured Sorcery, and Love transfigured Appetite, and 
Philosophy man's ordered Wonder, and Prayer his softening Fear. 
And similarly, in the natural religion of Wordsworth we may dis- 
cern the modified outcome of other human impulses hardly less 
universal — of those instincts which led our forefathers to people 
earth and air with deities, or to vivify the whole universe with a 
single soul. In this view the achievement of Wordsworth was of 
a kind which most of the moral leaders of the race have in some 
way or other performed. It was that he turned a theology back 
again into a religion ; that he revived in a higher and purer form 
those primitive elements of reverence for Nature's powers which 
had diffused themselves into speculation, or crystallised into mythol- 
ogy ; that for a system of beliefs about Nature, which paganism 
had allowed to become grotesque — of rites which had become un- 
meaning — lie substituted an admiration for Nature so constant, an 
understanding of her so subtle, a sympathy so profound, that they 
became a veritable worship. Such worship, I repeat, is not what 



WORDSWORTH. 87 

we commonly imply either by paganism or by pantheism. For in 
pagan countries, though the gods may have originally represented 
natural forces, yet the conception of them soon becomes anthro- 
pomorphic, and they are reverenced as transcendent men; and, on 
the other hand, pantheism is generally characterised by an indif- 
ference to things in the concrete, to Nature in detail; so that the 
Whole, or Universe, with which the Stoics (for instance) sought to 
be in harmony, was approached not by contemplating external ob- 
jects, but rather by ignoring them. 

Yet here I would be understood to speak only in the most gen- 
eral manner. So congruous in all ages are the aspirations and the 
hopes of men that it would be rash indeed to attempt to assign the 
moment when any spiritual truth rises for the first time on human 
consciousness. But thus much, I think, may be fairly said, that 
the maxims of Wordsworth's form of natural religion were uttered 
before Wordsworth only in the sjnse in which the maxims of 
Christianity were uttered before Christ. To compare small things 
with great — or, rather, to compare great things with things vastly- 
greater — the essential spirit of the Lines near Tintem Abbey was 
for practical purposes as new to mankind as the essential spirit of 
the Sermon on the Mount. Not the isolated expression of moral 
ideas, but their fusion into a whole in one memorable personality, 
is that which connects them forever with a single name. There- 
fore it is that Wordsworth is venerated ; because so many men — 
indifferent, it may be, to literary or poetical effects, as such — he 
has shown by the subtle intensity of his own emotion how the con- 
templation of Nature can be made a revealing agency, like Love or 
Prayer — an opening, if indeed there be any opening, into the tran- 
scendant world. 

The prophet with such a message as this will, of course, appeal 
for the most part to the experience of exceptional moments — those 
moments when " we see into the life of things ; " when the face of 
Nature sends to us "gleams like the flashing of a shield "—hours 
such as those of the Solitary, who, gazing on the lovely distant 
scene, 

" Would gaze till it became 
Far lovelier, and his heart could not sustain 
The beauty, still more beauteous." 

But the idealist, of whatever school, is seldom content to base 
his appeal to us upon these scattered intuitions alone. There is a 
whole epoch of our existence whose memories, differing, indeed, 
immensely in vividness and importance in the minds ofdifferent 
men, are yet sufficiently common to all men to form a favourite 
basis for philosophical argument. "The child is father of the 
man ; " and through the recollection and observation of early child- 
hood we may hope to trace our ancestry — in heaven above or on 
the earth beneath — in its most significant manifestation. 

It is to the workings of the mind of the child that the philosopher 
appeals who wishes to prove that knowledge is recollection, and 



88 WORDS IVOR TH. 

that our recognition of geometrical truths — so prompt as to appeal 
instinctive — depends on our having been actually familiar with 
them in an earlier world. The Christian mystic invokes with equal 
confidence his own memories of a state which seemed as yet to 
know no sin : 

" Happy those early days, when I 
Shined in my angel infancy ! 
Before I understood this place 
Appointed for my second race, 
Or taught my soul to fancy aught 
But a white, celestial thought; 
When yet I had not walked ahove 
A mile or two from my first Love, 
And, looking back at that short space, 
Could see a glimpse of His bright face ; 
When on some gilded cloud or flower 
My gazing soul would dwell an hour, 
And in those weaker glories spy 
Some shadows of eternity ; 
Before I taught my tongue to wound 
My conscience with a sinful sound, 
Or had the black art to dispense 
A several sin to every sense, 
But felt through all this fleshly dress 
Bright shoots of everlastingness." 

And Wordsworth, whose recollections were exceptionally vivid, 
and whose introspection was exceptionally penetrating, has drawn 
from his own childish memories philosophical lessons which are 
hard to disentangle in a logical statement, but which will roughly 
admit of being classed under two heads. For, firstly, he has shown 
an unusual delicacy of analysis in eliciting the " firstborn affinities 
that fit our new existence to existing things " — in tracing the first 
impact of impressions which are destined to give the mind its earli- 
est ply, or even, in unreflecting natures, to determine the perma- 
nent modes of thought. And, secondly, from the halo of pure and 
vivid emotions with" which our childish years are surrounded, and 
the close connexion of this emotion with external nature, which it 
glorifies and transforms, he infers that the soul has enjoyed else- 
where an existence superior to that of earth, but an existence of 
which external nature retains for a time the power of reminding 
her. 

The first of these lines of thought may be illustrated by a pass- 
age in the Prelude, in which the boy's mind is represented as 
passing through precisely the train of emotion which we may im- 
agine to be at the root of the theology of many barbarous peoples 
He is rowing at night alone on Esthwaite Lake, his eyes fixed upon 
a ridge of crags, above which nothing is visible : 

" I dipped my oars into the silent lake, 
And as I rose upon the stroke my boat 



WORDSWORTH: 89 

Went heaving through the water like a swan; 

When, from behind that craggy steep till then 

The horizon's bound, a huge peak, black and huge, 

As if with voluntary power instinct 

Upreared its head.' I struck and struck again ; 

And, growing still in stature, the grim shape 

Towered up between me and the stars, and still, 

For so it seemed, with purpose of its own, 

And measured motion like a living thing, 

Strode after me. With trembling oars I turned, 

And through the silent water stole my way 

Back to the covert of the willow-tree ; 

There in her mooring-place I left my bark, 

And through the meadows homeward went, in grave 

And serious mood. But after I had seen 

That spectacle, for many days, my brain 

Worked with a dim and undetermined sense 

Of unknown modes of being ; o'er my thoughts 

There hung a darkness — call it solitude, 

Or blank desertion. No familiar shapes 

Remained, no pleasant images of trees, 

Of sea, or sky, no colours of green fields ; 

But huge and mighty forms, that do not live 

Like living men, moved slowly thro' the mind 

By day, and were a trouble to my dreams." 

In the controversy as to the origin of the worship of inanimate 
objects, or of the powers of Nature, this passage might fairly be 
cited as an example of the manner in which those objects, or those 
powers, can impress the mind with that awe which is the founda- 
tion of savage creeds, while yet they are not identified with any 
human intelligence, such as the spirits of ancestors or the like, 
nor even supposed to operate according to any human analogy. 

Up to this point Wordsworth's reminiscences may seem simply 
to illustrate the conclusions which science reaches by other roads. 
But he is not content with merely recording and analysing his 
childish impressions ; he implies, or even asserts, that these 
" fancies from afar are brought " — that the child's view of the 
world reveals to him truths which the man with difficulty retains 
or recovers. This is not the usual teaching of science, yet it 
would be hard to assert that it is absolutely impossible. The 
child's instincts may well be supposed to partake in larger meas- 
ure of the general instincts of the race, in smaller measure of 
the special instincts of his own country and century, than is 
the case with the man. Now the feelings and beliefs of each 
successive century will probably be, on the whole, superior to 
those of any previous century. But this is not universally true ; 
the teaching of each generation does not thus sum up the results 
of the whole past. And thus the child, to whom in a certain sense 
the past of humanity is present — who is living through the whole 
life of the race in little, before he lives the life of his century in 
large — may possibly dimly apprehend something more of truth in 
certain directions than is visible to the adults around him. 



g o WORDS WOR TH. 

But, thus qualified, the intuitions of infancy mi ght seem scarcely 
worth insisting on. And Wordsworth, as is well known, has fol- 
lowed Plato in advancing for the child a much bolder claim. The 
child's soul, in this view, has existed before it entered the body — 
lias existed in a world superior to ours, but connected, by the im- 
manence of the same pervading Spirit, with the material universe 
before our eyes. The child begins by feeling this material world 
strange to him. But he sees in it, as it were, what he has been 
accustomed to see; he discerns in it its kinship with the spiritual 
world which he dimly remembers ; it is to him "an unsubstantial 
fairy place " — a scene at once brighter and more unreal than it 
will appear in his eyes when he has become acclimatised to earth. 
And even when this freshness of insight has passed away, it occa- 
sionally happens that sights or sounds of unusual beauty or carry- 
ing deep associations — a rainbow, a cuckoo's cay, a sunset of ex- 
traordinary splendour — will renew for a while this sense of vision 
and nearness to the spiritual world — a sense which never loses its 
reality, though with advancing years its presence grows briefer 
and more rare. 

Such then, in prosaic statement, is the most characteristic 
message of Wordsworth. And it is to be noted that though 
Wordsworth at times presents it as a coherent theory, yet it is not 
necessarily of the nature of a theory, nor need be accepted or re- 
jected as a whole ; but is rather an inlet of illumining emotion in 
which different minds can share in the measure of their capacities 
or their need. There are some to whom childhood brought no 
strange vision of brightness, but who can feel their communion 
with the Divinity in Nature growing with the growth of their 
souls. There are others who might be unwilling to acknowledge 
any spiritual or transcendent source for the elevating joy which 
the contemplation of Nature can give, but who feel, nevertheless, 
that to that joy Wordsworth has been their most effective guide. 
A striking illustration of this fact may be drawn from the passage 
in which John Stuart Mill, a philosopher of a very different school, 
has recorded the influence exercised over him by Wordsworth's 
poems, read in a season of dejection, when there seemed to be no 
real and substantive joy in life, nothing but the excitement of the 
struggle with the hardships and injustices of human fates. 

" What made Wordsworth's poems a medicine for my state of mind," 
he says, in his Autobiography, "was that they expressed, not mere out- 
ward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought coloured by feeling, under 
the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the 
feelings which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source 
of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be 
shared in by all human beings, which had no connexion with struggle or 
imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the 
physical or social condition of mankind. From them I seemed to learn 
what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater 
evils of life shall have been removed. And I felt myself at once better 
and happier as I came under their influence." 



WORDSWORTH. 



9* 



Words like these, proceeding from a mind so different from 
the poet's own, form perhaps as satisfactory a testimony to the 
value of his work as any writer can obtain : for they imply that 
Wordsworth has succeeded in giving his own impress to emotions 
which may become common to all ; that he has produced a body 
of thought which is felt to be both distinctive and coherent, while 
yet it enlarges the reader's capacities instead of making demands 
upon his credence. Whether there be theories they shall pass ; 
whether there be systems, they shall fail ; the true epoch-maker in 
the history of the human soul is the man who educes from this be- 
wildering universe a new and elevating joy. 

I have alluded above to some of the passages, most of them 
familiar enough, in which Wordsworth's sense of the mystic rela- 
tion between the world without us and the world within — the cor- 
respondence between the seen and the unseen — is expressed in 
its most general terms. But it is evident that such a conviction 
as this, if it contain any truth, cannot be barren of consequences 
on any level of thought. The communion with Nature which is 
capable of being at times sublimed to an incommunicable ecstasy 
must be capable also of explaining Nature to us so far as she can 
be explained ; there must be axiomala media of natural religion ; 
there must be something in the nature of poetic truths, standing 
midway between mystic intuition and delicate observation. 

How rich Wordsworth is in these poetic truths — how illumining 
is the gaze which he turns on the commonest phenomena — how 
subtly and variously he shows us the soul's innate perceptions or 
inherited memories, as it were, co-operating with Nature and " half 
creating" the voice with which she speaks — all this can be learnt 
by attentive study alone. Only a few scattered samples can be 
given here : and I will begin with one on whose significance the 
poet has himself dwelt. This is the poem called The Leech-Gath- 
erer, afterwards more formally named Resolution and Indepen- 
dence. 

" I will explain to you," says Wordsworth, "in prose, my feel- 
ings in writing that poem. I describe myself as having been ex- 
alted to the highest pitch of delight by the joyousness and beauty 
of Nature ; and then as depressed, even in the midst of those 
beautiful objects, to the lowest dejection and despair. A young poet 
in the midst of the happiness of Nature is described as overwhelmed 
by the thoughts of the miserable reverses which have befallen the 
happiest of all men, viz., poets. I think of this till I am so deeply 
impressed with it. that I consider the manner in which I am res- 
cued from my dejection and despair almost as an interposition of 
Providence. A person reading the poem with feelings like mine 
will have been awed and controlled, expecting something spiritual 
or supernatural. What is brought forward ? A lonely place, ' a 
pond, by which an old man was, far from all house or home ; ' not 
stood, nor sat, but was — the figure presented in the most naked sim- 
plicity possible. The feeling of spirituality or supernaturalness is 
again referred to as being strong in my mind in this passage. How 



o, 2 WORDS IVOR TH. 

came he here^ thought I, or what can he be doing? I then de- 
scribe him, whether ill or well is not for me to judge with perfect 
confidence ; but this I can confidently affirm, that though I be- 
lieve God has given me a strong imagination, I cannot conceive a 
figure more impressive than that of an old man like this, the sur- 
vivor of a wife and ten children, travelling alone among the moun- 
tains and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude, and 
the necessities which an unjust state of society has laid upon him. 
You speak of his speech as tedious. Everything is tedious when 
one does got read with the feelings of the author. The Thorn is 
tedious to hundreds ; and so is The Idiot Boy to hundreds. It is 
in the character of the old man to tell his story, which an impatient 
reader must feel tedious. But, good heavens ! such a figure, 
in such a place ; a pious, self-respecting, miserably infirm and 
pleased old man, telling such a tale ! " 

The naive earnestness of this passage suggests to us how con- 
stantly recurrent in Wordsworth's mind were the two trains of 
ideas which form the substance of the poem ; the interaction, 
namely (if so it may be termed), of the moods of Nature with the 
moods of the human mind ; and the dignity and interest of man as 
man, depicted with no complex background of social or political 
life, but set amid the primary affections and sorrows, and the wild 
aspects of the external world. 

Among the pictures which Wordsworth has left us of the in- 
fluence of Nature on human character, Peter Bell may be taken as 
marking one end, and the poems on Lucy the other end of the 
scale. Peter Bell lives in the face of Nature untouched alike by 
her terror and her charm ; Lucy's whole being is moulded by Na- 
ture's self ; she is responsive to sun and shadow, to silence and to 
sound, and melts almost into an impersonation of a Cumbrian val- 
ley's peace Between these two extremes how many are the 
possible shades of feeling! In Buth, for instance, the point im- 
pressed upon us is that Nature's influence is only salutary so long 
as she is herself, so \o say, in keeping with man ; that when her 
operations reach that degree of habitual energy and splendour at 
which our love for her passes into fascination and our admiration 
into bewilderment, then the fierce and irregular stimulus consorts 
no longer with the growth of a temperate virtue • 



" The wind, the tempest roaring high, 
The tumul t of a tropic sky, 

Might well be dangerous food 
For him, a youth to whom was given 
So much of earth, so much of heaven, 

And such impetuous blood." 

And a contrasting touch recalls the healing power of those gentle 
and familiar presences which came to Ruth in her stormy madness 
with visitations of momentary calm : 



WORDSWORTH. 93 

H Yet sometimes milder hours she knew, 
Nor wanted sun, nor rain, nor dew, 

Nor pastimes of the May ; 
They all were with her in her cell ; 
And a wild brook with cheerful knell 

Did o'er the pebbles play." 

I will give one other instance of this subtle method of dealing 
with the contrasts in nature. It is from the poem entitled 
'• Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-Tree which stands near the Lake 
of Esthwaite, on a desolate part of the Shore, commanding a beau- 
tiful Prospect." This seat was once the haunt of a lonely, a disap- 
pointed, an embittered man. 

" Stranger ! these gloomy boughs 
Had charms for him ; and here he loved to sit, 
His only visitants a straggling sheep, 
The stone-chat, or the glancing sand-piper ; 
And on these barren rocks, with fern and heath 
And juniper and thistle sprinkled o'er, 
Fixing his downcast eye, he many an hour 
A morbid pleasure nourished, tracing here 
An emblem of his own unfruitful life ; 
And, lifting up his head, he then would gaze 
On the more distant scene — how lovelv 'tis 
Thou seest — and he would gaze till it became 
Far lovelier, and his heart could not contain 
The beauty, still more beauteous ! Nor, that time, 
When Nature had subdued him to herself, 
Would he forget those beings, to whose minds, 
Warm from the labours of benevolence, 
The world, and human life, appeared a scene 
Of kindred loveliness ; then he would sigh 
With mournful joy, to think that others felt 
What he must never feel : and so, lost Man ! 
On visionary views would fancy feed 
Till his eyes streamed with tears." 

This is one of the passages which the lover of Wordsworth 
quotes, perhaps, with some apprehension ; not knowing how far it 
carries into the hearts of others its affecting power : how vividly it 
calls up before them that mood of desolate loneliness when the 
whole vision of human love and jov hangs like a mirage in the air, 
and only when it seems irrecoverably distant seems also intolerably 
dear. But, however this particular passage mav impress the reader, 
it is not hard to illustrate bv abundant references the potent origi- 
nality of Wordsworth's outlook on the external world. 
. There was indeed no aspect of nature, however often depicted, 
m which his seeing eye could not discern some unnoted quality; 
there was no mood to which nature gave birth in the mind of man 
from which his meditation could not disen^a^e some element which 
threw light on our inner being. How often has the approach of 



94 WORDSWORTH. 

evening been described! and how mysterious is its solemnising 
power ! Yet it was reserved for Wordsworth, in his sonnet, " Hail, 
Twilight, sovereign of one peaceful hour," to draw out a character- 
istic of that grey waning light which half explains to us its sombre 
and pervading charm. " Day's mutable distinctions " pass away; 
all in the landscape that suggests our own age or our own handi- 
work is gone ; we look on the sight seen by our remote ancestors, 
and the visible present is generalised into an immeasurable past. 

The sonnet on the Duddon beginning " What aspect bore the 
Man who roved or fled First of his tribe to this dark dell ? " carries 
back the mind along the same track, with the added thought of 
Nature's permanent gentleness amid the "hideous usages" of 
primeval man — through all which the stream's voice was innocent, 
and its flow benign. " A weight of awe not easy to be borne " fell 
on the poet, also, as he looked on the earliest memorials which 
these remote ancestors have left us. The Sonnet on a Stone-Cir- 
cle which opens with these words is conceived in a strain of emo- 
tion never more needed than now — when Abury itself owes its pres- 
ervation to the munificence of a private individual — when stone-cir- 
cle or round-tower, camp or dolmen, are destroyed to save a few shil- 
lings, and occupation-roads are mended with the immemorial altars 
of an unknown God. " Speak, Giant-mother ! tell it to the Morn ! " 
— how strongly does the heart re-echo the solemn invocation which 
calls on those abiding witnesses to speak once of what they knew 
long ago ! 

The mention of these ancient worships may lead us to ask in 
what manner Wordsworth was affected by the Nature-deities of 
Greece and Rome — impersonations which have preserved through 
so many ages so strange a charm. And space must be found here 
for the characteristic sonnet in which the baseness and materialism 
of modern life drives him back on whatsoever of illumination and 
reality lay in that young ideal. 

" The world is too much with us ; late and soon, 

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers ; 

Little we see in Nature that is ours ; _ 
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon ! 
The Sea that bares her bosom 'to the moon ; 

The Winds that will be howling at all hours, 

And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; 
For this, for everything we are out of tune ; 
It moves us not. Great God ! I'd rather be 

A pagan suckled in a creed outworn ; 
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, 

Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; 
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea : 

Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn." 

Wordsworth's own imagination idealised Nature in a different 
way. The sonnet " Brook ! whose society the poet seeks '? places 
him among the men whose Nature-deities have not yet become 



WORDSWORTH. 



95 



anthropomorphic — men to whom " unknown modes of being "may 
seem more lovely as well as more awful than the life we know. He 
would not give to his idealised brook " human cheeks, channels tor 
tears — no Naiad shouldst thou be " — 

" It seems the Eternal Soul is clothed in thee 
With purer robes than those of flesh and blood, 
And hath bestowed on thee a better good ; 
Unwearied joy, and life without its cares." 

And in the Sonnet on Calais Beach the sea is regarded in the same 
way, with a sympathy (if 1 may so say) which needs no help from 
an imaginary impersonation, but strikes back to a sense of kinship 
which seems antecedent to the origin of man. 

"It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free; 
The holy time is quiet as a Nun 
Breathless with adoration ; the broad sun 

Is sinking down in its tranquillity ; 

The gentleness of heaven is on the Sea : 
Listen ! the mighty Being is awake, 
And doth with his eternal motion make 

A sound like thunder — everlastingly." 

A comparison, made by Wordsworth himself, of his own method 
of observing Nature with Scott's expresses in less mystical lan- 
guage something of what I am endeavouring to say. 

" He expatiated much to me one day," says Mr. Aubrey de Vere, " as 
we walked among the hills above Grasmere, on the mode in which Nature 
had been described by one of the most justly popular of England's modern 
poets — one for whom he preserved a high and affectionate respect. ' He 
took pains,' Wordsworth said ; ' he went out with his pencil and note-book, 
and jotted down whatever struck him most — a river rippling over the 
sands, a ruined tower on a rock above it, a promontory, and a mountain- 
ash waving with its berries. He went home and wove the whole together 
into a poetical description.' After a pause, Wordsworth resumed, with a 
flashing eye and impassioned voice : ' But Nature does not permit an in- 
ventory to be made of her charms ! He should have left his pencil and note- 
book at home, fixed his eye as he walked with a reverent attention on all 
that surrounded him, and taken all into a heart that could understand and 
enjoy. Then, after several days had passed by, he should have interro- 
gated his memory as to the scene. He would have discovered that, while 
much of what he had admired was preserved to him, much was aiso 
most wisely obliterated ; that which remained — the picture surviving in 
his mind — would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the 
scene, and done so in a large part by discarding much which, though in 
itself striking, was not characteristic. In every scene many of the most 
brilliant details are but accidental ; a true eye for Nature does not note 
them, or at least does not dwell on them.' " 

How many a phrase of Wordsworth's rises in the mind in illus- 
tration of this power ! phrases which embody in a single picture, 



9 6 WORDSWORTH 

or a single image — it may be the vivid wildness of the flowery cop- 
pice, of 

" Flaunting summer, when he throws 
His soul into the briar-rose " — 

or the melancholy stillness of the declining year — 

" Where floats 
O'er twilight fields the autumnal gossamer;" 

or, as in the words which to the sensitive Charles Lamb seemed 
too terrible for art, the irresponsive blankness of the universe — 

" The broad open eye of the solitary sky " — 

beneath which mortal hearts must make what merriment they may. 
Or take those typical stanzas in Peter Bell, which so long were 
accounted among Wordsworth's leading absurdities. 

" In vain through every changeful year 
Did Nature lead him as before ; 

A primrose by the river's brim 

A yellow primrose was to him, 
And it was nothing more. 

" In vain, through water, earth, and air, 
The soul of happy sound was spread, 

When Peter, on some April morn, 

Beneath the broom or budding thorn, 
Made the warm earth his lazy bed. 

" At noon, when by the forest's edge 

He lay beneath the branches high, 

The soft blue sky did never melt 

Into his heart — he never felt 

The witchery of the soft blue sky ! 

"On a fair prospect some have looked 
And felt, as I have heard them say, 

As if the moving time had been 

A thing as steadfast as the scene 
On which they gazed themselves away." 

In all these passages, it will be observed, the emotion is educed 
from Nature rather than added to her ; she is treated as a mystic 
text to be deciphered, rather than as a stimulus to roving imagina- 
tion. This latter mood, indeed, Wordsworth feels occasionally, as 
in the sonnet where the woodland sights become to him "like a 
dream of the whqle world ; " but it is checked by the recurring 
sense that "it is our business to idealise the real, and not to 
realise the ideal." Absorbed in admiration of fantastic clouds of 
sunset, he feels for a moment ashamed to think that they are unre- 
memberable — 



WORDSWORTH. 

" They are of the sky, 
And from our earthly memory fade away." 



97 



But soon he disclaims this regret, and reasserts the paramount 
interest of the things that we can grasp and love : 

" Grove, isle, with every shape of sky-built dome, 
Though clad in colours beautiful and pure, 
Find in the heart of man no natural home : 
The immortal Mind craves objects that endure : 
These cleave to it ; from these it cannot roam, 
Nor they from it : their fellowship is secure." 

From this temper of Wordsworth's mind, it follows that there 
will be many moods in which we shall not retain him as our com- 
panion. Moods which are rebellious, which beat at the bars of 
fate; moods of passion reckless in its vehemence, and assuming 
the primacy of all other emotions through the intensity of its de- 
light or pain; moods of mere imaginative phantasy, when we would 
fain shape from the well-worn materials of our thought some fabric 
at once beautiful and new; from all such phases of our inward be- 
ing Wordsworth stands aloof. His poem on the nightingale and 
the stock-dove illustrates with half-conscious allegory the contrast 
between himself and certain other poets. 

" O Nightingale ! thou surely art 
A creature of a fiery heart ; 
These notes of thine — they pierce and pierce j 
Tumultuous harmony and fierce ! 
Thou sing'st as if the God of wine 
Had helped thee to a Valentine; 
A song in mockery and despite 
Of shades, and dews, and silent Night ; 
And steady bliss, and all the loves 
Now sleeping in their peaceful groves. 

** I heard a Stock-dove sing or say 
His homely tale, this very day ; 
His voice was buried among trees, 
Yet to be come at by the breeze : 
He did not cease ; but cooed — and cooed, 
And somewhat pensively he wooed. 
He sang of love with quiet blending, 
Slow to begin, and never ending ; 
Of serious faith and inward glee ; 
That was the Song — the Song for me ! " 

" His voice was buried among trees" says Wordsworth ; " a 
metaphor expressing the love of seclusion by which this bird is 
marked; and characterising its note as not partaking of the shrill 
and the piercing, and therefore more easily deadened by the inter- 
vening shade ; yet a note so peculiar, and withal so pleasing, that 
the breeze, gifted with that love of the sound which the poet feels, 



9 8 WORDSWORTH. 

penetrates the shade in which it is entombed, and conveys it to the 
ear of the listener." 

Wordsworth's poetry on the emotional side (as distinguished 
from its mystical or its patriotic aspects) could hardly be more ex- 
actly described than in the above sentence. For while there are 
few poems of his which could be read to a mixed audience with the 
certainty of producing an immediate impression ; yet, on the other 
hand, all the best ones gain in an unusual degree by repeated 
study ; and this is especially the case with those in which some 
touch of tenderness is enshrined in a scene of beauty, which it 
seems to interpret, while it is itself exalted by it. Such a poem is 
Stepping Westward, where the sense of sudden fellowship, and 
the quaint greeting beneath the glowing sky, seem to link man's 
momentary wanderings with the cosmic spectacles of heaven. 
Such are the lines where all the wild romance of Highland scenery, 
the forlorn ness of the solitary vales, pours itself through the lips 
of the maiden singing at her work, "as if her song could have no 
ending " — 

" Alone she cuts and binds the grain, 

And sings a melancholy strain ; 

O listen ! for the Vale profound 

Is overflowing with the sound." 

Such— and with how subtle a difference! — is the Frxgment in 
which a "Spirit of noonday " wears on his face the silent joy of 
Nature in her own recesses, undisturbed by beast, or bird, or 
man — 

" Nor ever was a cloudless sky 
So steady or so fair." 

And such are the poems — We are Seven, The Pet Lamb, * Louisa, 
The Two April Mornings — in which the beauty of rustic children 
melts, as it were, into Nature herself, and the 

"Blooming girl whose hair was wet 
With points of morning dew " 

becomes the impersonation of the season's early joy. We may 
apply, indeed, to all these girls Wordsworth's description of lever- 
ets playing on a lawn, and call them — 

" Separate creatures in their several gifts 
Abounding, but so fashioned that in all 

* The Pet Lamb is probably the only poem of Wordsworth's which can be charged 
with having done moral injury, and that to a single individual alone. " Barbara Lew- 
thwaite," says Wordsworth, in 1843, " was not, in fact, the child whom I had seen and 
overheard as engaged in the poem. I chose the name for reasons implied in the above " 
(/. e., an account of her remarkable beauty), " and will here add a caution against the use 
of names of living persons. Within a few months after the publication of this poem I 
was much surprised, and more hurt, to find it in a child's school-book, which, having been 
compiled by Lindley Murray, had come into use at Grasmere School, where Barbara was 
a pupil. And, alas, I had the mortification of hearing that she was very vain of being 
thus distinguished ; and in after life she used to say that she remembered the incident, and 
what I said to her upon the occasion." 



WORDSWORTH. gg 

That Nature prompts them to display, their looks, 
Their starts of motion and their fits of rest, 
An undistinguishable style appears 
And character of gladness, as if Spring 
Lodged in their innocent bosoms, and the spirit 
Of the rejoicing Morning were their own." 

My limits forbid me to dwell longer on these points. The 
passages which I have been citing have been for the most part 
selected as illustrating the novelty and subtlety of Wordsworth's 
view of nature. But it will now be sufficiently clear how contin- 
ually a strain of human interest is interwoven with the delight 
derived from impersonal things. 

" Long have I loved what I behold, 
The night that calms, the day that cheers : 
The common growth of mother earth 
Suffices me — her tears, her mirth, 
Her humblest mirth and tears." 

The poet of the Waggoner — who, himself a habitual water- 
drinker, has so glowingly described the glorification which the 
prospect of nature receives in a half-intoxicated brain — may justly 
claim that he can enter into all genuine pleasures, even of an order 
which he declines for himself. With anything that is false or arti- 
ficial he cannot sympathise, nor with such faults as baseness, 
cruelty, rancour, which seem contrary to human nature itself ; but 
in dealing with faults of mere weakness he is far less strait-laced 
than many less virtuous men. 

He had, in fact, a reverence for human beings as such, which 
enabled him to face even their frailties without alienation ; and 
there was something in his own happy exemption from such falls 
which touched him into regarding men less fortunate rather with 
pity than disdain : 

" Because the unstained, the clear, the crystalline, 
Have ever in them something of benign." 

His comment on Burns's Tarn o 1 Shanter will perhaps surprise 
some readers who are accustomed to think of him only in his 
didactic attitude. 

"It is the privilegeof poetic genius," he says, " to catch, under certain 
restrictions of which, perhaps, at the time of its being exerted it is but 
dimly conscious, a spirit of pleasure wherever it can be found, in the walks 
of nature, and in the business of men. The poet, trusting to primary in- 
stincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured 
while he describes the fairer aspects of war, nor does he shrink from the 
company of the passion of love, though immoderate — from convivial 
pleasures, though intemperate — nor from the presence of war, though 
savage, and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. Frequently and 
admirably has Burns given way to these impulses of nature, both with 
reference to himself and in describing the condition of others. Who, but 



IO o WORDSWORTH. 

some impenetrable dunce or narrow-minded puritan in works of art, ever 
read without delight the picture which he has drawn of the convivial exul- 
tation of the rustic adventurer, Tarn o' Shanter ? The poet fears not to 
tell the reader in the outset that his hero was a desperate and sottish drunk- 
ard, whose excesses were as frequent as his opportunities. This reprobate 
sits down to his cups while the storm is roaring, and heaven and earth are 
in confusion ; the night is driven on by song and tumultuous noise, laughter 
and jest thicken as the beverage improves upon the palate — conjugal 
fidelity archly bends to the service of general benevolence — selfishness is 
not absent, but wearing the mask of social cordiality ; and while these 
various elements of humanity are blended into one proud and happy com- 
position of elated spirits, the anger of the tempest without doors only 
heightens and sets off the enjoyment within. I pity him who cannot per- 
ceive that in all this, though there was no moral purpose, there is a moral 
effect. 

"' Kings may be blest, but Tarn was glorious, 
O'er a' the ills of life victorious.' 

What a lesson do these words convey of charitable indulgence for the 
vicious habits of the principal actor in the scene, and of those who re- 
semble him ! Men who to the rigidly virtuous are objects almost of loath- 
ing, and whom therefore they cannot serve ! The poet, penetrating the 
unsightly and disgusting surfaces of things, has unveiled with exquisite 
skill the finer ties of imagination and feeling, that often bind these beings 
to practices productive of so much unhappiness to themselves, and to 
those whom it is their duty to cherish ; and, as far as he puts the reader 
into possession of this intelligent sympathy, he qualifies him for exercising 
a salutary influence over the minds of those who are thus deplorably en- 
slaved." 

The reverence for man as man, the sympathy for him in his 
primary relations and his essential being, of which these comments 
on Tarn o y S/ianler form so remarkable an example, is a habit of 
thought too ingrained in all Wordsworth's works to call for specific 
illustration. The figures of Michael, of Matthetv, of the Brothers, 
of the hero of the Excursion, and even of the Idiot Boy, suggest 
themselves at once in this connexion. But it should be noted in 
each case how free is the poet's view from any idealisation of the 
poorer classes as such, from the ascription of imaginary merits to 
an unknown populace which forms the staple of so much revolu- 
tionary eloquence. These poems, while they form the most con- 
vincing rebuke to the exclusive pride of the rich and great, are 
also a stern and strenuous incentive to the obscure and lowly. 
They are pictures of the poor man's life as it is — pictures as free as 
Crabbe's from the illusion of sentiment — but in which the delight 
of mere observation (which in Crabbe predominates) is subordinated 
to an intense sympathy with all such capacities of nobleness and 
tenderness as are called out by the stress and pressure of penury 
or woe. They form for the folk of northern England (as the works 
of Burns and Scott for the Scottish folk) a gallery of figures that 
are modelled, as it were, both from without and from within ; by 
one with experience so personal as to keep every sentence vividly 
accurate, and yet with an insight which could draw from that simple 



WORDSWORTH. IOI 

life lessons to itself unknown. We may almost venture to generalise 
our statement further, and to assert that no writer since Shakspeare 
has left us so true a picture of the British nation. In Milton, in- 
deed, we have the characteristic English spirit at a whiter glow ; 
but it is the spirit of the scholar only, or of the ruler, not of the 
peasant, the woman, or the child. Wordsworth gives us that spirit 
as it is diffused among shepherds and husbandmen — as it exists in 
obscurity and at peace. And they who know what makes the 
strength of nations need wish nothing better than that the temper 
which he saw and honoured among the Cumbrian dales should be 
the temper of all England, now and for ever. 

Our discussion of Wordsworth's form of Natural Religion has 
led us back by no forced transition to the simple life which he de- 
scribed and shared. I return to the story of his later years — if 
that be called a story which derives no interest from incident or 
passion, and dwells only on the slow broodings of a meditative 
soul. 



i 02 WORDS WOK TH. 



CHAPER XI. 

ITALIAN TOUR. — ECCLESIASTICAL SONNETS. — POLITICAL VIEWS. 
— LAUREATESHIP. 

Wordsworth was fond of travelling, and indulged this taste 
whenever he could afford it. Comparing himself and Southey, he 
says in 1843 : " My lamented friend Southey used to say that, had 
he been a Papist, the course of life which in all probability would 
have been his was that of a Benedictine monk, in a convent fur- 
nished with an inexhaustible library. Books were, in fact, his 
passion ; and wandering, I can with truth affirm, was mine ; but 
this propensity in me was happily counteracted by inability from 
want of fortune to fulfil my wishes." We find him, however, fre- 
quently able to contrive a change of scene. His swift tour in 
1790, his residence in France in 1 791-2, his residence in Germany, 
1 798-9, have been already touched on. Then came a short visit 
to France in August, 1802, which produced the sonnets on West- 
minster Bridge and Calais Beach. The tour in Scotland which 
was so fertile in poetry took place in 1803. A second tour in 
Scotland, in 181 4, produced the Brownie's Cell and a few other 
pieces. And in July, 1820, he set out with his wife and sister and 
two or three other friends for a tour through Switzerland and Italy. 

This tour produced a good deal of poetry ; and here and there 
are touches which recall the old inspiration. Such is the compari- 
son of the clouds about the Engelberg to hovering angels ; and such 
the description of the eclipse falling upon the population of statues 
which throng the pinnacles of Milan Cathedral. But for the most 
part the poems relating to this tour have an artificial look ; the 
sentiments in the vale of Chamouni seem to have been laboriously 
summoned for the occasion ; and the poet's admiration for the 
Italian maid and the Helvetian girl is a mere shadow of the old 
feeling for the Highland girl, to whom, in fact, he seems obliged to 
recur in order to give reality to his new emotion. 

To conclude the subject of Wordsworth's travels, I will mention 
here that in 1823 he made a tour in Holland, and in 1824 in North 
Wales, where his sonnet to the torrent at the Devil's Bridge recalls 
the Swiss scenery seen in his youth with vigour and dignity. In 

1828 he made another excursion in Belgium with Coleridge, and in 

1829 he visited Ireland with his friend Mr. Marshall. Neither of 
these tours was productive. In 1831 he paid a visit with his 



WORDSWORTH. I03 

daughter to Sir Walter Scott at Abbotsford, before his departure 
to seek health in Italy. Scott received them cordially, and had 
strength to take them to the Yarrow. " Of that excursion," says 
Wordsworth, " the verses Yarrow Revisited are a memorial. On 
our return in the afternoon we had to cross the Tweed, directly 
opposite Abbotsford. A rich but sad light, of rather a purple than 
a golden hue, was spread over the Eildon hills at that moment ; 
and, thinking it probable that it might be the last time Sir Walter 
would cross the stream (the Tweed), I was not a little moved, and 
expressed some of my feelings in the sonnet beginning, A trouble 
not of clouds nor weeping rain. At noon on Thursday we left 
Abbotsford, and on the morning of that day Sir Walter and I had 
a serious conversation, tete-a-tete, when he spoke with gratitude of 
the happy life which, upon the whole, he had led. He had written 
in my daughter's album, before he came into the breakfast-room 
that morning, a few stanzas addressed to her; and, while putting 
the book into her hand, in his own study, standing by his desk, he 
said to her, in my presence, ' I should not have done anything of 
this kind but for your father's sake ; they are probably the last 
verses I shall ever write.' They show how much his mind was im- 
paired ; not by the strain of thought, but by the execution, some of 
the lines being imperfect, and one stanza wanting corresponding 
rhymes. One letter, the initial S, had been omitted in the spelling 
of his own name." 

There was another tour in Scotland in 1833, which produced 
Memorials of little poetic value. And in 1837 he made a long tour 
in Italy with Mr. Crabbe Robinson. But the poems which record 
this tour indicate a mind scarcely any longer susceptible to any 
vivid stimulus except from accustomed objects and ideas. The 
Musings near Aquapendente are musings on Scott and Helvellyn; 
the Pine Tree of Monte Mario is interesting because Sir George 
Beaumont has saved it from destruction ; the Cuckoo at Laverna 
brings all childhood back into his heart. " I remember perfectly 
well," says Crabbe Robinson. " that I heard the cuckoo at Laverna 
twice before he heard it ; and that it absolutely fretted him that 
my ear was first favoured : and that he exclaimed with delight, ' I 
hear it ! I hear it ! ' " This was his last foreign tour ; nor, indeed, 
are these tours very noticeable except as showing that he was not 
blindly wedded to his own lake scenery; that his admiration could 
face comparisons, and keep the same vividness when he was fresh 
from other orders of beauty. 

The productions of these later years took for the most part a 
didactic rather than a descriptive form. In the volume entitled 
Poems chie/ly of Early and Later Years, published in 1842, were 
many hortatory or ecclesiastical pieces of inferior merit, and among 
them various additions to the Ecclesiastical Sketches, a series of 
sonnets begun in 1821, but which he continued to enlarge, spend- 
ing on them much of the energies of his later years. And although 
it is only in a few instances — as in the description of King's 
College, Cambridge — that these sonnets possess force or charm 



IC 4 WORDSWORTH. 

eno'ugh to rank them high as poetry, yet they assume a certain 
value when we consider not so much their own adequacy as the 
greater inadequacy of all rival attempts in the same direction. 

The Episcopalian Churchman, in this country or in the United 
States, will certainly nowhere find presented to him in poetical 
form so dignified and comprehensive a record of the struggles and 
the glories, of the vicissitudes and the edification, of the great body 
to which he belongs. Next to the Anglican liturgy, though next 
at an immense interval, these sonnets may take rank as the authen- 
tic exposition of her historic being — an exposition delivered with 
something of her own unadorned dignity, and in her moderate and 
tranquil tone. 

I would not, however, seem to claim too much. The religion 
which these later poems of Wordsworth's embody is rather the 
stately tradition of a great Church than the pangs and aspirations of 
a holy soul. There is little in them, whether for good or evil, of 
the stuff of which a Paul, a Francis, a Dominic are made. That 
fervent emotion — akin to the passion of love rather than to intel- 
lectual or moral conviction — finds voice through singers of a very 
different tone. It is fed by an inward anguish and felicity which, 
to those who have not felt them, seem as causeless as a lover's 
moods ; by wrestlings not with flesh and blood ; by nights of de- 
spairing self-abasement ; by ecstasies of an incommunicable peace. 
How great the gulf between Wordsworth and George Herbert ! — 
Herbert '-offering at heaven, growing and groaning thither " — and 
Wordsworth, for whom the gentle regret of the lines — 

" Me this unchartered freedom tires, 
I feel the weight of chance desires " — 

forms his most characteristic expression of the self-judgment of the 
solitary soul. 

Wordsworth accomplished one reconciliation of great impor- 
tance to mankind. He showed, as plainly in his way as Socrates 
had shown it long ago, with what readiness a profoundly original 
conception of the scheme of things will shape itself into the mould 
of an established and venerable faith. He united the religion of 
the philosopher with the religion of the churchman ; one rarer thing 
he could not do : he could not unite the religion of the philosopher 
with the religion of the saint. It is, indeed, evident that the most 
inspiring feeling which breathes through Wordsworth's ecclesiasti- 
cal pieces is not of a doctrinal, not even of a spiritual kind. The 
ecclesiastical as well as the political sentiments of his later years 
are prompted mainly by the admiring love with which he regarded 
the structure of English society — seen as that society was by him 
in its simplest and most poetic aspect. This concrete attachment 
to the scenes about him had always formed an important element 
in his character. Ideal politics, whether in Church or State, had 
never occupied his mind, which sought rather to find its informing 
principles embodied in the England of his own day. The sonnet 



WORDS IVOR TH. T r 

On a Parsonage in Oxfordshire well illustrates the loving minute- 
ness with which- he draws out the beauty and fitness of the estab- 
lished scheme of things — the power of English country life to 
satisfy so many moods of feeling. 

The country-seat of the English squire or nobleman has be- 
come — may we not say ? — one of the world's chosen types of a 
happy and a stately home. And Wordsworth, especially in his 
poems which deal with Coleorton, has shown how deeply he felt 
the sway of such a home's hereditary majesty, its secure and tran- 
quillising charm. Yet there are moods when the heart which 
deeply feels the inequality of human lots turns towards a humbler 
idea. There are moments when the broad park, the halls and 
towers seem no longer the fitting frame of human greatness, but 
rather an insolating solitude, and unfeeling triumph over the poor. 

In such a mood of mind it will not always satisfy us to dwell, 
as Wordsworth has so often done, on the virtue and happiness 
that gather round a cottage hearth — which we must, after all, judge 
by a somewhat less exacting standard. We turn rather to the 
" refined rusticity " of an English Parsonage home — 

" Where holy ground begins, unhallowed ends, 
Is marked by no distinguishable line ; 
The turf unites, the pathways intertwine " — 

and the clergyman's abode has but so much of dignity as befits the 
minister of the Church which is the hamlet's centre ; enough to 
suggest the old Athenian boast of beauty without extravagance, 
and study without effeminacy ; enough to show that dwellings 
where not this life but another is the prevailing thought and care, 
yet need not lack the graces of culture nor the loves of home. 

The sonnet on Seathwaite Chapel, and the life of Robert 
Walker, the incumbent of Seathwaite, which is given at length in 
notes to the sonnets on the Duddon, afford a still more character- 
istic instance of the clerical ideal towards which Wordsworth nat- 
urally turned. In Robert Walker he had a Cumbrian statesman 
turned into a practical saint; and he describes him with a gusto in 
which his laboured sonnets on Laud or on Dissensions are wholly 
deficient. 

It was in social and political matters that the consequences of 
this idealising view of the facts around him in Cumberland were 
most apparent. Take education, for example. Wordsworth, as 
has been already stated, was one of the earliest and most impres- 
sive assertors of the national duty of teaching every English child to 
read. He insists on this with a prosaic earnestness which places 
several pages of the Excursion among what may be called the 
standing bugbears which his poems offer to the inexperienced 
reader. And yet as soon as, through the exertions of Bell and 
Lancaster, there seems to be some chance of really educating the 
poor, Dr. Bell, whom Coleridge fondly imagines as surrounded in 
heaven by multitudes of grateful angels, is to Wordsworth a name 



1 06 WORDS IVOR TH. 

of horror. The mistresses trained on his system are called " Dr 
Bell's sour-looking teachers in petticoats." And the instruction 
received in these new-fangled schools is compared to " the training 
that fits a boxer for victory in the ring." The reason of this ap- 
parent inconsistency is not far to seek. Wordsworth's eyes 
were fixed on the village life around him. Observation of that life 
impressed on him the imperative necessity of instruction in reading. 
But it was from a moral rather than an intellectual point of view 
that he regarded it as needful, and, this opening into the world of 
ideas once secured, he held that the cultivation of the home affec- 
tions and home duties was all that was needed beyond. And thus 
the Westmoreland dame, " in her summer seat in the garden, and 
in winter by the fireside," was elevated into the unexpected posi- 
tion of the ideal instructress of youth. 

Conservatism of this kind could provoke nothing but a sympa- 
thetic smile. The case was different when the same conservative 
— even retrogade — tendency showed itself on subjects on which 
party-feeling ran high. A great part of the meditative energy of 
Wordsworth's later years was absorbed by questions towards whose 
solution he contributed no new element, and which filled him with 
disproportionate fears. And some injustice has been done to his 
memory by those who have not fully realised the predisposing causes 
which were at work — the timidity of age, and the deep-rooted at- 
tachment to the England which he knew. 

I speak of age, perhaps, somewhat prematurely, as the poet's 
gradually growing conservatism culminated in his opposition to the 
Catholic Relief Bill before he was sixty years old. But there 
is nothing to wonder at in the fact that the mind of a man of 
brooding and solitary habits should show traces of advancing age 
earlier than is the case with statesmen or men of the world, who 
are obliged to keep themselves constantly alive to the ideas of the 
generation that is rising around them. A deadness to new impres- 
sions, an unwillingness to make intellectual efforts in fresh direc- 
tions, a tendency to travel the same mental pathways over and over 
again, and to wear the ruts of prejudice deeper at every step; 
such traces of age as these undoubtedly manifested themselves in 
the way in which the poet confronted the great series of changes — 
Catholic Emancipation, Reform Bill, New Poor Law — on which 
England entered about the year 1829. " My sixty-second year," 
Wordsworth writes, in 1832, " will soon be completed ; and though 
I have been favoured thus far in health and strength beyond most 
men of my age, yet I feel its effects upon my spirits ; they sink 
under a pressure of apprehension to which, at an earlier period of 
my life, they would probably have been superior." To this it must 
be added that the increasing weakness of the poet's eyes seriously 
limited his means of information. He had never read much con- 
temporary literature, and he read less than ever now. He had no 
fresh or comprehensive knowledge of the general condition of the 
country, and he really believed in the prognostication which was 
uttered by many also who did not believe in it, that with the Re- 



WORDS IVOR TH. io j 

form Bill the England which he knew and loved would practically 
di'saDpear. But there was nothing in him of the angry polemic, 
nothing of the calumnious partisan. One of the houses where Mr. 
Wordsworth was most intimate and most welcome was that of a 
reforming member of Parliament, who was also a manufacturer, thus 
belonging to the two classes for which the poet had the greatest 
abhorrence. But the intimacy was never for a moment shaken, and, 
indeed, in that house Mr. Wordsworth expounded the ruinous ten- 
dency of Reform and manufactures with even unusual copiousness, 
on account of the admiring affection with which he felt himself sur- 
rounded. The tone in which he spoke was never such as could 
give pain or excite antagonism ; and — if I may be pardoned for 
descending to a detail which well illustrates my position — the only 
rejoinder which these diatribes provoked was that the poet on his 
arrival was sometimes decoyed into uttering them to the younger 
members of the family, whose time was of less value, so as to set 
his mind free to return to those topics of more permanent interest 
where his conversation kept to the last all that tenderness, nobility, 
wisdom, which in that family, as in many others familiar with the 
celebrated persons of that day, won for him a regard and a reverence 
such -as was accorded to no other man. 

To those, indeed, who realised how deeply he felt these changes 
— how profoundly his notion of national happiness was bound up 
with a lovely and vanishing ideal — the prominent reflection was that 
the hopes and principles which maintained through all an underly- 
ing hope and trust in the future must hr.ve been potent indeed. It 
was no easy optimism which promoted the lines written in 1837 — 
one of his latest utterances — in which he speaks to himself with 
strong self-judgment and resolute hope. On reading them one 
shrinks from dwelling longer upon an old man's weakness and a 
brave man's fears. 

" If this great world of joy and pain 
Revolve in one sure track ; 
If Freedom, set, revive again, 
And Virtue, flown, come back — 

" Woe to the purblind crew who fill 
The heart with each clay's care, 
Nor learn, from past and future, skill 
To bear and to forbear." 

The poet had also during these years more of private sorrow 
than his tranquil life had for a long time experienced. In 1832 his 
sister had a most serious illness, which kept her for many months in 
a state of great prostration, and left her, wnen the physical symp- 
toms abated, with her intellect painfully impaired, and her bright 
nature permanently overclouded. Coleridge, too, was nearing 
his end. " He and my beloved sister," writes Wordsworth, in 
1832, "are the two beings to whom my intellect is most indebted, 
and they are now proceeding, as it were, pari passu, along the path 



I0 g WORDS IVOR TH. 

of sickness, I will not say towards the grave, but I trust towards a 
blessed immortality." 

In July, 1834, "every mortal power of Coleridge was frozen at 
its marvellous source." And although the early intimacy had 
scarcely been maintained — though the " comfortless and hidden 
-veil " had, for a time at least, replaced the " living murmuring 
fount of love " which used to spring beside Wordsworth's door- 
yet the loss was one which the surviving poet deeply felt. Cole- 
ridge was the only contemporary man of letters with whom Words- 
worth's connexion had been really close ; and when Wordsworth 
is spoken of as one of a group of poets exemplifying in various ways 
the influence of the Revolution, it is not always remembered how 
very little he had to do with the other famous men of his time. Scott 
and Southey were valued friends, but he thought little of Scott's 
poetry, and less of Southey's. Byron and Shelley he seems scarcely 
to have read ; and there is' nothing to show that he had ever heard of 
Keats. But to Coleridge his mind constantly reverted ; he called 
him "the most wonderful man he had ever known," andjie kept 
him as the ideal auditor of his own poems, long after Coleridge had 
listened to the Prelude — 

" A song divine of high and passionate thoughts 
To their own music chanted." 

In 1836, moreover, died one for whom Coleridge, as well as 
Wordsworth, had felt a very high respect and regard — Sarah Hutch- 
inson, Mrs. Wordsworth's sister, and long the inmate of Words- 
worth's household. This most valued friend had been another in- 
stance of the singular good fortune which attended Wordsworth in 
his domestic connexions ; and when she was laid in Grasmere 
churchyard, the stone above her tomb expressed the wish of the 
poet and his wife that, even as her remains were laid beside their 
dead children's, so their own bodies also might be laid by hers. 

And now, while the inner circle of friends and relations began 
to pass away, the outer circle of admirers was rapidly spreading. 
Between the years 1830 and 1840 Wordsworth passed from the 
apostle of a clique into the most illustrious man of letters in Eng- 
land. The rapidity of this change was not due to any remarkable 
accident, nor to the appearance of any new work of genius. It was 
merely an extreme instance of what must always occtir where an 
author, running counter to the fashion of his age, has to create his 
own public in defiance of the established critical powers. The 
disciples whom he draws round him are for the most part young ; 
the established authorities are for the most part old ; so that by the 
time that the original poet is about sixty years old, most of his 
admirers will be about forty, and most of his critics will be dead. 
His admirers now become his accredited critics ; his works are 
widely introduced to the public ; and if they are really good his 
reputation is secure. In Wordsworth's case the detractors had 
been unusually persistent, and the reaction, when it came, was there- 



WORDS IVOR TH. Y oq 

fore unusually violent ; it was even somewhat factitious in its ex- 
tent ; and the poems were forced by enthusiasts upon a public 
which was only half ripe for them. After the poet's death a tem- 
porary counter-reaction succeeded, and his fame is only now finding 
its permanent level. 

Among the indications of growing popularity was the publication 
of an American edition of Wordsworth's poems in 1837, by Professor 
Reed, of Philadelphia, with whom the poet interchanged many 
letters of interest. " The acknowledgments." he says, in one of 
these, " which I receive from the vast continent of America are among 
the most grateful that reach me. What a vast field is there open 
to the English mind, acting through our noble language ! Let us 
hope that our authors of true genius will not be unconscious of 
that thought, or inattentve to the duty which it imposes upon them, 
of doing their utmost to instruct, to purify, and to elevate their 
readers." 

But of all the manifestations of the growing honour in which 
Wordsworth was held, none was more marked or welcome than 
the honorary degree of D.C.L. conferred on him by the University 
of Oxford in the summer of 1839. Keble, as Professor of Poetry, 
introduced him in words of admiring reverence, and the enthusiasm 
of the audience was such as had never been evoked in that place 
before, " except upon the occasions of the visits of the Duke of 
Wellington." The collocation was an interesting one. The special 
claim advanced for Wordsworth by Keble in his Latin oration was 
" that he had shed a celestial light upon the affections, the occupa- 
tions, the piety of the poor." And to many men besides the author 
of the Christian Year it seemed that this striking scene was, as it 
were, another visible triumph of the temper of mind which is of 
the essence of Christianity ; a recognition that one spirit more had 
become as a little child, and had entered into the kingdom of 
heaven. 

In October, 1842, another token of public respect was bestowed 
on him in the shape of an annuity of 300/. a year from the Civil 
List for distinguished literary merit. " I need scarcely add," says 
Sir Robert Peel, in making the offer, " that the acceptance by you 
of this mark of favour from the Crown, considering the grounds on 
which it is proposed, will impose no restraint upon your perfect 
independence, and involve no obligation of a personal nature." In 
March, 1843, came the death of Southey, and in a few days Words- 
worth received a letter from Earl De la Warr, the Lord Chamber- 
lain, offering him, in the most courteous terms, the office of Poet 
Laureate, which, however, he respectfully declined as imposing 
duties " which, far advanced in life as I am, I cannot venture to 
undertake." 

This letter brought a reply from the Lord Chamberlain, pressing 
the office on him again, and a letter from Sir Robert Peel which 
gave dignified expression to the national feeling in the matter. 
" The offer," he says, " was made to you by the Lord Chamberlain, 
with my entire concurrence, not for the purpose of imposing on you 



1 1 o WORDS IVOR TH. 

any onerous or disagreeable duties, but in order to pay you that 
tribute of respect which is justly due to the first of living poets. 
The Queen entirely approved of the nomination, and there is one 
unanimous feeling on the part of all who have heard of the pro- 
posal (and it is pretty generally known) that there could not be a 
question about the selection. Do not be deterred by the fear of 
any obligations which the appointment may be supposed to imply. 
I will undertake that you shall have nothing required ixova. you. 
But as the Queen can select for this honourable appointment no 
one whose claims for respect and honour, on account of eminence 
as a poet, can be placed in competition with yours, I trust you will 
•not longer hesitate to accept it." 

This letter overcame the aged poet's scruples; and he filled with 
silent dignity the post of Laureate till, after seven years' space, a 
worthy successor received 

" This laurel greener from the brows 
Of him that uttered nothing base." 



WORDS WOR TH. j x l 



CHAPTER XII. 

LETTERS ON THE KENDAL AND WINDERMERE RAILWAY. — CON- 
CLUSION. 

Wordsworth's appointment to the Laureateship was signifi- 
cant in more ways than one. He was so much besides a poet, that 
his appointment implied something of a national recognition, not 
only of his past poetical achievements, but of the substantial truth 
of that body of principles which through many years of neglect and 
ridicule he had consistently supported. There was, therefore, 
nothing incongruous in the fact that the only composition of any 
importance which Wordsworth produced after he became Laureate 
was in prose — his two letters on the projected Kendal and Winder- 
mere railway, 1844. No topic, in fact, could have arisen on which 
the veteran poet could more fitly speak with whatever authority his 
official spokesmanship of the nation's higher life could give, for it 
was a topic with every aspect of which he was familiar ; and so far 
as the extension of railways through the Lake country was defended 
on grounds of popular benefit (and not merely of commercial ad- 
vantage) no one, certainly, had shown himself more capable of 
estimating at their full value such benefits as were here proposed. 

The results which follow on a large incursion of visitors into 
the Lake country may be considered under two heads, as affecting 
the residents, or as affecting the visitors themselves. And first as 
to the residents. Of the wealthier class of these I say nothing, as 
it will perhaps be thought that their inconvenience is outweighed 
by the possible profits which the railway may bring to speculators 
or contractors. But the effect produced' on the poorer residents — 
on the peasantry — is a serious matter, and the danger which was 
distantly foreseen by Wordsworth has since his day assumed grave 
proportions. And lest the poet's estimate of the simple virtue 
which is thus jeopardised should be suspected of partiality, it may 
be allowable to corroborate it by the testimony of an eminent man 
not a native of the district, though a settler therein in later life, and 
whose writings, perhaps, have done more than any man's since 
Wordsworth to increase the sum of human enjoyment derived both 
from Art and from Nature. 

" The Border peasantry of Scotland and England," says Mr. 
Ruskin,* ''painted with absolute fidelity by Scott and Wordsworth 

* A Protest against the Extension of Railways in the Lake District. — Simpkin, 
Marshall and Co., 1876. 



U2 WORDSWORTH. 

(for leading types out of this exhaustless portraiture, I may name 
Dandie Dinmont, and Michael), are hitherto a scarcely injured race; 
whose strength and virtue yet survive to represent the body and 
soul of England, before her days of mechanical decrepitude and 
commercial dishonour. There are men working in my own fields 
who might have fought with Henry the Fifth at Agincourt, without 
being discerned from among his knights ; I can take my trades- 
men's word for a thousand pounds ; my garden gate opens on the 
latch to the public road, by day and night, without fear of any foot 
entering but my own ; and my girl-guests may wander by road or 
moorland, or through every bosky dell of this wild wood, free as 
the heather-bees or squirrels. What effect on the character of 
such a population will be produced by the influx of that of the sub- 
urbs of our manufacturing towns there is evidence enough, if the 
reader cares to ascertain the facts, in every newspaper on his morn- 
ing table." 

There remains the question of how the greatest benefit is to be 
secured to visitors to the country, quite apart from the welfare of 
its more permanent inhabitants. At first sight this question seems 
to present a problem of a well-known order — to find the point of 
maximum pleasure to mankind in a case where the intensity of 
the pleasure varies inversely as its extension — where each fresh 
person who shares it diminishes pro tanto the pleasure of the rest. 
But, as Wordsworth has pointed out, this is not in reality the ques- 
tion here. To the great mass of cheap excursionists the character- 
istic scenery of the Lakes is in itself hardly a pleasure at all. The 
pleasure, indeed, which they derive from contact with Nature is 
great and important, but it is one which could be offered to them, 
not only as well but much better, near their own homes. 

" It is benignly ordained that green fields, clear blue skies, running 
streams of pure water, rich groves and woods, orchards, and all the ordi- 
nary varieties of rural nature should find an easy way to the affections of 
all men. But a taste beyond this, however desirable it may be that every 
one should possess it, is not to be implanted at once ; it must be gradu- 
ally developed both in nations and individuals. Rocks and mountains, 
torrents and wide-spread waters, and all those features of nature which 
go to the composition of such scenes as this part of England is distin- 
guished for, cannot, in their finer relations to the human mind, be com- 
prehended, or even very imperfectly conceived, without processes of cul- 
ture or opportunities of observation in some degree habitual. In the eye 
of thousands and tens of thousands, a rich meadow, with fat cattle grazing 
upon it, or the sight of what they would call a heavy crop of corn, is worth 
all that the Alps and Pyrenees in their utmost grandeur and beauty could 
show to them; and it is noticeable what trifling conventional preposses- 
sions will, in common minds, not only preclude pleasure from the sight of 
natural beauty, but will even turn it into an object of disgust. In the midst 
of a small pleasure-ground immediately below my house rises a detached 
rock, equally remarkable for the beauty of its form, the ancient oaks that 
grow out of it, and the flowers and shrubs which adorn it. 'What a nice 
place would this be,' said a Manchester tradesman, pointing to the rock, 
'if that ugly lump were but out of the way.' Men as little advanced in 






WORDSWORTH. 



113 



the pleasure which such objects give to others are so far from being rare 
that they may be said fairly to represent a large majority of mankind. 
This is the fact, and none but the deceiver and the willingly deceived can 
be offended by its being stated." 

And, since this is so, the true means of raising the taste of the 
masses consists, as Wordsworth proceeds to point out, in giving 
them — not a few hurried glimpses of what is above their compre- 
hension, but permanent opportunities of learning at leisure the first 
great lessons which Nature has to teach. Since he wrote thus our 
towns have spread their blackness wider still, and the provision of 
parks for the recreation of our urban population has become a 
pressing national need. And here, again, the very word recreation 
suggests another unfitness in the Lake country for these purposes. 
Solitude is as characteristic of that region as beauty, and what the 
mass of mankind need for their refreshment — most naturally and 
justly — is not solitude but society. 

" The silence that is in the starry sky, 
The sleep that is among the lonely bills," 

is to them merely a drawback, to be overcome by moving about in 
large masses, and by congregating in chosen resorts with vehe- 
ment hilarity. It would be most unreasonable to wish to curtail the 
social expansion of men whose lives are for the most part passed 
in a monotonous round of toil. But is it kinder and wiser — from 
any point of view but the railway shareholder's — to allure them into 
excursion trains by the prestige of a scenery which is to them (as 
it was to all classes a century or two ago) at best indifferent, or to 
provide them near at hand with their needed space for rest and 
play, not separated from their homes by hours of clamour and 
crowding, nor broken up by barren precipices, nor drenched with 
sweeping storm ? 

Unquestionably it is the masses whom we have first to consider. 
Sooner than that the great mass of the dwellers in towns should be de- 
barred from the influences of Nature — sooner than that they should 
continue for another century to be debarred as now they are — it 
might be better that Cumbrian statesmen and shepherds should be 
turned into innkeepers and touts, and that every poet, artist, dreamer 
in England should be driven to seek his solitude at the North 
Pole. But it is the mere futility of sentiment to pretend that there 
need be any real collision of interests here. There is space enough 
in England yet for all to enjoy in their several manners, if those who 
have the power would leave some unpolluted rivers, and some un- 
blighted fields, for the health and happiness of the factory-hand, 
whose toil is for their fortunes, and whose degradation is their 
shame. 

Wordsworth, while indicating, with some such reasoning as this, 
the true method of promoting the education of the mass of men in 
natural joys, was assuredly not likely to forget that in every class, 
even the poorest, are found exceptional spirits which some inbred 



r j 4 WORDS IVOR TH. 

power has attuned already to the stillness and glory of the hills. 
In what way the interests of such men may best be consulted, he 
has discussed in the following passage : 

" • O Nature, a' thy shows an' forms 

To feeling pensive hearts hae charms . 

So exclaimed the Ayrshire ploughman, speaking of ordinary rural 
nature under the varying influences of the seasons ; and the senti- 
ment has found an echo in the bosoms of thousands in as humble 
a condition as he himself was when he gave vent to it. But then 
they were feeling, pensive hearts — men who would be among the 
first to lament the facility with which they had approached this 
region, by a sacrifice of so much of its quiet and beauty, as, from 
the intrusion of a railway, would be inseparable. What can, in 
truth, be more absurd than that either rich or poor should be spared 
the trouble of travelling by the high roads over so short a space, 
according to their respective means, if the unavoidable conse- 
quence must be a great disturbance of the retirement, and, in many 
places, a destruction of the beauty, of the country which the par- 
ties are come in search of ? Would not this be pretty much like 
the child's cutting up his drum to learn where the sound came 
from ? " 

The truth of these words has become more conspicuous since 
Wordsworth's day. The Lake country is now both engirdled and 
intersected with railways. The point to which even the poorest 
of genuine lovers of the mountains could desire that his facilities 
of cheap locomotion should be carried has not only reached but far 
overpassed. If he is not content to dismount from his railway 
carriage at Coniston, or Seascale, or Bowness — at Penrith, or Trout- 
beck, or Keswick — and to move at eight miles an hour in a coach, 
or at four miles an hour on foot, while he studies that small inter- 
vening tract of country, of which every mile is a separate gem — 
when, we may ask, is he to dismount ? what is he to study? Or is 
nothing to be expected from nature but a series of dissolving 
views ? 

It is impossible to feel sanguine as to the future of this irre- 
placeable national possession. A real delight in scenery — apart 
from the excitements of sport or mountaineering, for which Scot- 
land and Switzerland are better suited than Cumberland — is still 
too rare a thing among the wealthier as among the poorer classes 
to be able to compete with such a power as the Railway Interest. 
And it is little likely now that the Government of England should 
act with regard to this district as the Government of the United 
States has acted with regard to the Yosemite and Yellowstone val- 
leys, and guard as a national possession the beauty which will be- 
come rarer and more precious with every generation of men. But 
it is in any case desirable that Wordsworth's unanswered train of 
reasoning on the subject should be kept in view — that it should be 
clearly understood that the one argument for making more railways 



WORDSWORTH. 



H5 



through the Lakes is that they may possibly pay; while it is cer- 
tain that each railway extension is injurious to the peasantry of the 
district, and to all visitors who really care for its scenery, while 
conferring no benefit on the crowds who are dragged many miles 
to what they do not enjoy, instead of having what they really want 
secured to them, as it ought to be, at their own doors. 

It is probable that all this will continue to be said in vain. 
Railways, and mines, and waterworks will have their way, till injury 
has become destruction. The natural sanctuary of England, the 
nurse of simple and noble natures, " the last region which Astraea 
touches with flying feet," will be sacrificed — it is scarcely possible 
to doubt it — to the greed of gain. We must seek our consolation 
in the thought that no outrage on nature is mortal ; that the ever- 
springing affections of men create for themselves continually some 
fresh abode, and inspire some new landscape with a consecrating 
history, and, as it were, with a silent soul. Yet it will be long ere 
round some other lakes, upon some other hill, shall cluster memo- 
ries as pure and high as those which hover still around Rydal and 
Grasmere, and on Helvellyn's windy summit, "and by Glenridding 
Screes and low Glencoign." 

With this last word of protest and warning — uttered, as it may 
seem to the reader, with unexpected force and conviction from out 
of the tranquillity of a serene old age — Wordsworth's mission is 
concluded. The -prophecy of his boyhood is fulfilled, and the " dear 
native regions " whence his dawning genius rose have been gilded 
by the last ray of its declining fire. There remains but the do- 
mestic chronicle of a few more years of mingled sadness and peace. 
And I will first cite a characteristic passage from a letter to his 
American correspondent, Mr. Reed, describing his presentation as 
Laureate to the Oueen : 

" The reception given me by the Queen at her ball was most 
gracious. Mrs. Everett, the wife of your Minister, among many 
others, was a witness to it, without knowing who I was. It moved 
her to the shedding of tears. This effect was in part produced, I 
suppose, by American habits of feeling, as pertaining to a republi- 
can government. To see a gray-haired man of seventy-five years 
of age kneeling down in a large assembly to kiss the hand of a 
young woman is a sight for which institutions essentially demo- 
•cratic do not prepare a spectator of either sex, and must naturally 
place the opinions upon which a republic is founded, and the senti- 
ments which support it, in strong contrast with a government based 
and upheld as ours is." 

In the same letter the poet introduces an ominous allusion to 
the state of his daughter's health. Dora, his 'only daughter who 
survived childhood, was the darling of Wordsworth s age. In her 
wayward gaiety and bright intelligence there was much to remind 
him of his sister's youth ; and his clinging nature wound itself 
round this new Dora as tenderly as it had ever done round her 
who was now only the object of loving compassion and care. In 
1841 Dora Wordsworth married Mr. Quillinan, an ex-officer of the 



„6 WORDSWORTH. 

Guards, and a man of great literary taste and some original power. 
In 1821 he had settled for a time in the vale of Rydal, mainly for 
the sake of Wordsworth's society ; and ever since then he had been 
an intimate and valued friend. He had been married before, but his 
wife died in 1822, leaving him two daughters, one of whom was 
named from the murmuring Rotha, and was god-child of the poet. 
Shortly after marriage, Dora Ouillinan's health began to fail. In 
1845 the Quillinans went to Oporto in search of health, and re- 
turned in f846, in the trust that it was regained. But in July, 1847, 
Dora Ouillinan died at Rydal, and left her father to mourn for his 
few remaining years his "immeasurable loss." 

The depth and duration of Wordsworth's grief, in such bereave- 
ments as fell to his lot, was such as to make his friends thankful 
that his life had, on the whole, been guided through ways of so pro- 
found a peace. 

Greatly, indeed, have they erred who have imagined him as 
cold, or even as by nature tranquil. "What strange workings," 
writes one from Rydal Mount, when the poet was in his sixty-ninth 
year — " what strange workings are there in his great mind ! How 
fearfully strong are all his feelings and affections ! If his intellect 
had been less powerful they must have destroyed him long ago." 
Such, in fact, was the impression which he gave to those who 
knew him best throughout life. The look of premature age, which 
De Ouincey insists on ; the furrowed and rugged countenance, 
the brooding intensity of the eye, the bursts of anger at the report 
of evil doings, the lonely and violent roamings over the mountains 
— all told of a strong absorption and a smothered fire. His own 
description of himself, in his Imitation of the Castle of Indolence, 
unexpected as it is by the ordinary reader, carries for those who 
knew him the stamp of truth : 

" Full many a time, upon a stormy night, 
His voice came to us from the neighbouring height : 

Oft did we see him driving full in view 
At mid-day when the sun was shining bright; 
What ill was on him, what he had to do, 
A mighty wonder bred among our quiet crew. 

Ah ! piteous sight it was to see this Man 

When he came back to us, a withered flower — 

Or like a sinful creature, pale and wan. 

Down would he sit ; and without strength or power 
Look at the common grass from hour to hour : 

And oftentimes, how long I fear to say, 

Where apple-trees in blossom made a bower, 

Retired in that sunshiny shade he lay; 

And, like a naked Indian, slept himself away. 

Great wonder to our gentle tribe it was 

Whenever from our valley he withdrew ; 
For happier soul no living creature has 

Than he had, being here the long day through. 






WORDS IVOR TH. r T 7 

Some thought he was a lover, and did woo : 
Some thought far worse of him, and judged him wrong: 

But Verse was what he had been wedded to ; 
And his own mind did like a tempest strong 
Come to him thus, and drove the weary wight along." 

An excitement which vents itself in bodily exercise carries its 
own sedative with it. And in comparing Wordsworth's nature 
with that of other poets whose career has been less placid, we may 
say that he was perhaps not less excitable than they, but that it 
was his constant endeavour to avoid all excitement save that of the 
purely poetical kind ; and that the outward circumstances of his 
life— his mediocrity of fortune, happy and early marriage, and ab- 
sence of striking personal charm — made it easy for him to adhere 
to a method of life which was, in the truest sense of the term, stoic 
— stoic alike in its practical abstinences and in its calm and grave 
ideal. Purely poetic excitement, however, is hard to maintain at 
a high point ; and the description quoted above of the voice which 
came through the stormy night should be followed by another — by 
the same candid and self-picturing hand— which represents the 
same. habits in a quieter light. 

" Nine-tenths of my verses," says the poet, in 1843, " nave Deen 
murmured out in the open air. One day a stranger, having walked 
round the garden and grounds of Rydal Mount, asked of one 
of the female servants, who happened to be at the door, permission 
to see her master's study. 'This,' said she, leading him forward, 
'is my master's library, where he keeps his books, but his study is 
out-of-doors.' After a long absence from home, it has more than 
once happened that some one of my cottage neighbours (not of the 
double-coach-house cottages) has said, ' VVell, there he is ! we are 
glad to hear him booing about again.' " 

Wordsworth's health, steady and robust for the most part, indi- 
cated the same restrained excitability. While he was well able to 
resist fatigue, exposure to weather, &c, there were, in fact there 
things which his peculiar constitution made it difficult for him to 
do, and unfortunately those three things were reading, writing, and 
the composition of poetry, A frequently recurring inflammation of 
the eyes, caught originally from exposure to a cold wind when over- 
heated by exercise, but always much aggravated by mental excite- 
ment, sometimes prevented his reading for months together. His 
symptoms when he attempted to hold the pen are thus described in 
a published letter to Sir George Beaumont (1803) : 

" I do not know from what cause it is, but during the last three 
years I have never had a pen in my hand for five minutes before 
my whole frame becomes a bundle of uneasiness; a perspiration 
starts out all over me, and my chest is oppressed in a manner which 
I cannot describe." While as to the labour of composition his 
sister says (September, 1800): " He writes with so much feeling 
and agitation that it brings on a sense of pain and internal weak- 
ness about his left side and stomach, which now often makes it rm- 



! ! 8 WORDS IVOR Til. 

possible for him to write when he is, in mind and feelings, in such 
a state that he could do it without difficulty." 

But turning to the brighter side of things— to the joys rather 
than the pains of the sensitive body and spirit — we find in Words- 
worth's later years much of happiness on which to dwell. The 
memories which his name recalls are for the most part of thought- 
ful kindnesses, of simple-hearted joy in feeling himself at last ap- 
preciated, of tender sympathy with the young. Sometimes it is a 
recollection of some London drawing-room, where youth and beauty 
surrounded the rugged old man with an eager admiration which fell 
on no unwilling heart. Sometimes it is a story of some assemblage 
of young and old, rich and poor, from all the neighbouring houses 
and cottages, at Rydal Mount, to keep the aged poet's birthday 
with a simple feast and rustic play. Sometimes it is a report of 
some fireside gathering at Lancrigg or Foxhow, where the old man 
grew eloquent as he talked of Burns and Coleridge, of Homer and 
Virgil, of the true aim of poetry and the true happiness of man. 
Or we are told of some last excursion to well-loved scenes ; of holly- 
trees planted by the poet's hands to stimulate nature's decoration 
on the craggy hill. 

Such are the memories of those who best remember him. To 
those who were young children while his last years went by he 
seemed a kind of mystical embodiment of the lakes and mountains 
round him — a presence without which they would not be what 
they were. And now he is gone, and their untouched and early 
charm is going too. 

" Heu, tua nobis 
Paene simul tecum solatia rapta, Menalca ! 

Rydal Mount, of which he had at one time feared to be deprived, 
was his to the end. He still paced the terrace-walks — but now the 
flat terrace oftener than the sloping one — whence the eye travels to 
lake and mountain across a tossing gulf of green. The doves that 
so long had been wont to answer with murmurs of their own to his 
"half-formed melodies " still hung in the trees above his pathway ; 
and many who saw him there must have thought of the lines in 
which his favourite poet congratulates himself that he has not been 
exiled from his home. 

" Calm as thy sacred streams thy years shall flow ; 
Groves which thy youth has known thine age shall know ; 
Here, as of old, Hyblsean bees shall twine 
Their mazy murmur into dreams of thine — 
Still from the hedge's willow-bloom shall come 
Through summer silences a slumberous hum — 
Still from the crag shall lingering winds prolong 
The half-heard cadence of the woodman's song — 
While evermore the doves, thy love and care, 
Fill the tall elms with sighing in the air." 

Yet words like these fail to give the solemnity of his last years 



WORDS YVOR 7YT. 1 1 g 

— the sense of grave retrospection, of humble self-judgment, of. 
hopeful looking to the end. " It is indeed a deep satisfaction," he 
writes, near the close of life, " to hope and believe that my poetry 
will be, while it lasts, a help to the cause of virtue and truth, espe- 
cially among the young. As for myself, it seems now of little 
moment how long I may be remembered. When a man pushes off 
in his little boat into the great seas of Infinity and Eternity, it surely 
signifies little how long he is kept in sight by watchers from the 
shore." 

And again, to an intimate friend, " Worldly-minded I am not : 
on the contrary, my wish to benefit those within my humble sphere 
strengthens seemingly in exact proportion to my inability to realise 
those wishes. What I lament most is that the spirituality of my 
nature does not expand and rise the nearer I approach the grave, 
as yours does, and as it fares with my beloved partner." 

The aged poet might feel the loss of some vividness of emotion, 
but his thoughts dwelt more and more constantly on the unseen 
world. One of the images which recurs oftenest to his friends is 
that of the old man as he would stand against the window of the 
dining-room at Rydal Mount and read the Psalms and Lessons for 
the day ; of the tall bowed figure and the silvery hair ; of the deep 
voice which always faltered when among the prayers he came to 
the words which give thanks for those " who have departed this 
life in Thy faith and fear." 

There is no need to prolong the narration. As healthy infancy 
is the same for all, so the old age of all good men brings philoso- 
pher and peasant once more together, to meet with the same 
thoughts the inevitable hour. Whatever the well-fought fight may 
have been, rest is the same for all. 

" Retirement then might hourly look 

Upon a soothing scene • 
Age steal to his allotted nook 

Contented and serene ; 
With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, 

In frosty moonlight glistening, 
Or mountain torrents, where they creep 
Along a channel smooth and deep, 

To their own far-off murmurs listening." 

What touch has given to these lines their impress of an unfath- 
omable peace ? For there speaks from them a tranquillity which 
seems to overcome our souls ; which makes us feel in the midst of 
toil and passion that we are disquieting ourselves in vain ; that we 
are travelling to a region where these things shall not be ; that 
"so shall immoderate fear leave us, and inordinate love shall die." 

Wordsworth's last days were absolutely tranquil. A cold 
caught on a Sunday afternoon walk brought on pleurisy. He lay for 
some weeks in a state of passive weakness ; and at last Mrs. Words- 
worth said to him, " William, you are going to Dora." " He made 
no reply at the time, and the words seemed to have passed un- 



120 WORDSWORTH. 

heeded ; indeed, it was not certain that they had been even heard. 
More than twenty-four hours afterwards one of his nieces came into 
his room, and was drawing aside the curtain of his chamber, and 
then, as if awakening from a quiet sleep, he said, ' Is that Dora ? " 
On Tuesday, April 23, 1850, as his favourite cuckoo-clock struck 
the hour of noon, his spirit passed away. His body was buried, as 
he had wished, in Grasmere churchyard. Around him the dales- 
men of Grasmere lie beneath the shade of sycamore and yew; and 
Rotha's murmur mourns the pausing of that " music sweeter than 
her own." And surely of him, if of any one, we may think as of a 
man who was so in accord with nature, so at one with the very soul 
of things, that there can be no mansion of the Universe which shall 
not be to him a home, no Governor who will not accept him among 
his servants, and satisfy him with love and peace. 



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is simply that of Arden s life and 
marriage, but it is never wearisome 
because of the sharpness of the writ- 
ing, and we have to thank Miss Robin- 
sou for a very good novel indeed." — 
Whitehall Review. 



New York : JOHN W. LOVELL COMPANY, 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY ADVERTISER. 

TTTSO? PUBLISHED. 

VICE VERSA; 

Or, A LESSON TO FATHERS, 
By F. ANSTEY. 

1 vol., 12mo., cloth gilt, $1.00; 1 vol., 12mo., paper, 50 cents; also in Lovell's 
Library, No. 30, 20 cents. 

EXTRACTS FROM NOTICES BY THE PRESS. 

THE SATURDAY REVIEW — " If there ever was a book made up from 
oeginning to end of laughter, yet not a comic book, or a 'merry' book, or a 
book of jokes, or a book of pictures, or a jest book, or a tomfool book, but a 
perfectly sober and serious book, in the reading of which a sober man may 
laugh without shame from beginning to end.it is the book called 'Vice 
Versa; or, a Lesson to Fathers.'. ... We close the book, recommending it 
very earnestly to all fathers, in the first instance, and their sons, nephews, 
uncies, and male cousins next." 

THE PALL MALL GAZETTE.— " 'Vice Versa' is one of the most 
diverting books that we have read for many a day. It is equally calculated to 
amuse the August idler, and to keep up the spirits of those who stay in town 

and work, while others are holiday making The book is singularly well 

written, graphic, terse, and full of nerve. The school-boy conversations are 
to the life, and every scene is brisk and well considered." 

THE ATHENAEUM.—" The whole story is told with delightful drollery 
and spirit, and there is not a dull page in the volume. It should be added that 
Mr.Anstey writes well, and in a style admirably suited to his amusing subject.'' 

THE SPECTATOR.—" Mr. Anstey deserves the thanks of everybody for 

showing that there is still a little fun left in this world It is long since we 

read anything mere truly humorous We must admit that we have not 

laughed so heartily over anything for some years bacii as we have over this 
' Lesson for Fathers.' " 

THE ACADEMY.—" It is certainly the best book of its kind that has ap- 
peared for a long time, and in the way of provoking laughter by certain old- 
fashioned means, which do not involve satire or sarcasm, it has few rivals." 

THE WORLD.—" The idea of a father and son exchanging their identity 
has suggested itself to many minds before now. It is illustrated in this book 

with surprising freshness, originality and force The book is more than 

wildly comic and amusing: it is in parts exceedingly pathetic. 1 ' 

THE COURT JOURNAL.— "The story is told with so much wit and 
gayety that we cannot be deceived in our impression of the future career of F. 
Anstey being destined to attain the greatest success among the most popular 
authors of the day." 

VANITY FAIR —"The book is, in our opinion, the drollest work ever 
written in the English language." 

TRUTH.—" Mr. Anstey has done an exceedingly difficult thing so admira- 
bly and artfully as to conceal its difficulties. Haven't for years read so irresist- 
ibly humorous a book." 



NEW YORK; 

JOHN W. LOVELL CO;, 14 and 16 Vesey Street. 



LOVELL'S 




AHEAD OF ALL COMPETITORS. 



The improvements being constantly made in "Loveir? 
Library " have placed it in tne Front Rank of cheap publi- 
cations in this country. The publishers propose to still 
further improve the series by having 

BETTER PAPER, 

BETTER PRINTING, 

LARGER TYPE, 
and more attractive cover than any other series in the market. 



m 



SEE "W^^T XS SAX3D OP IT: 

The following extract from a letter recently received 
shows the appreciation in which the Library is held by those 
who most constantly read it. 

" Mercantile Library, ) 
"BALTiaioRE August 29, 1883. f 
"Will you kindly send me two copies of your latest list ? I am 
glad to see that you now issue a volume every day. Your Library wj 
find greatly preferable to the ' Seaside ' and ' Franklin Square ' Series, 
and even better than the 12rao. form of the latter, the page being of 
better shape, the lines better leaded, and the words better spaced. 
Altogether your series is much more in favor with our subscribers than 
either of its rivals. 

" S. C DONALDSON, Assistant Librarian." 



JOHN" W. LOVSLL CO., Publishers, 

14 «Ss 13 Vesey Street, New ITorlsL. 



HEALTH and VIGOR 

FOR THE BRAIN AND NERVES. 




CROSBY'S VITALIZED FHOS-PHITES. 

This is a standard preparation with all physicians who treat 
nervous and mental disorders. 

Crosby's Vitalized Phosphites should be taken as a Special 
Brain Food. 

To build up worn-out nerves, to banish sleeolessness, neu- 
ralgia and sick headache. — Dr. Gwynn. ( u; 

To promote .good digestion. — Dr. Filmore. '? ^ ho 

To " stamp out " consumption. — Dr. Chum 

To " completly cure night sweats." — John B. "~ $tey. 

To maintain the capabilities of the brain and nerves to per- 
form all functions even at the highest tension. — E. L. Kellogg. 

To restore the energy lost by nervousness, debility, over- 
exertion or enervated vital powers. — Dr. W. S. Wells. 

To repair the nerves that have been enfeebled by worry, de- 
pression, anxiety or deep grief. — Miss Mary Rankin. 

To strengthen the intellect so that study and deep mental 
application may be a pleasure and not a trial. — B. M. Couch. 

To develop good teeth, glossy hair, c'ear skin, handsome nails 
in the young, so that they may be an inheritance in later years. — 
Editor School Journal. 

To enlarge the capabilities for enjoyment. — National Journal 
of Education. 

To "make life a pleasure," "not a daily suffering" "I 
really urge you to put it to the test." — Miss Emily Faithfull. 

To amplify bodily and mental power to the present genera- 
tion and "prove the survival of the fittest " to the next. — Bismarck. 

There is no other Vital Phos-phite, none that is extracted 
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To restore lost powers and abilities. — Dr. Bull. 

For sale by druggists or mail, $1. 
P. CROSBY CO., No. 56 West Twenty-fifth St., New York. 



LOVELL'S LIBRARY-CATALOGUE. 



185. Mysterious Island, Pt II. 15 
Mysterious Island, Pt 1 1 1. 15 

186. Tom Brown at Oxford, 

2 Parts, each 15 

187. Thicker than Water. . . .20 

188. In Silk Attire 20 

189. Scottish Chiefs, Part I.. 20 
Scottish Chiefs, Part 1 1 . 20 

190. Willy Reilly 20 

191. The Nautz Family 20 

192. Great Expectations 20 

193. Hist.of Pendennis,Pt I..20 
Hist.of Pendennis,Pt II 20 

194. Widow Bedott Papers ..20 

195. Daniel Deronda,Part I . .20 
Daniel Deronda, Part II. 20 

196. Altiora Peto 20 

197. By the Gate of the Sea.. 15 

198. Tales of a Traveller 20 

199. Life and Voyages of Co- 

lumbus, 2 Parts, each. 20 

200. The Pilgrim's Progress.. 20 

201. MartinChuzzlewit,P'rt I.20 
MartinChuzzlewit,P't II. 20 

202. Theophrastus Such 10 

203 . Disarmed 15 

204. Eugene Aram 20 

205. The Spanish Gypsy, &C.20 

206. Cast up by the Sea 20 

207. Mill on the ^Joss ° art I^S 
Mill on the FlcV Vtll.15 

208. Brother Jacob, e) ' ■ •" ' J 

209. The Ex« ..-v 1C"7 20 

210. American! 5 r5 

211. The Newcomes, Part I.. 20 
The Newcomes, Part II. 20 

212. The Privateersman 20 

2 13. The Three Feathers 20 

214. Phantom Fortune 20 

215. The Red Eric 20 

216. Lady Silverdale's Sweet- 

heart . 10 

217. The Four Macnicol's . ..10 
2i8.Mr.PisistratusBrown,M.P.io 

219. Dombeyand Son, Part 1. 20 
Dombey and Son, Part 1 1. 20 

220. Book of Snobs 10 

221. Fairy Tales, Illustrated. .2*0 

222. The Disowned 20 

223. Little Dorrit, Part 1 20 

Little Dorrit, Part II 20 

224. Abbotsford and New- 

stead Abbey io 

225. Oliver^ Goldsmith, Black 10 

226. The Fire Brigade 20 

227. Rifle and Hound in Cey- 
lon 20 

228. Our Mutual Friend, P't 1. 20 
OurMutualFriend.P't II. 20 

229. Paris Sketches 15 

230. Belinda 20 

231. Nicholas Nickleby.P't 1. 20 
NicholasNickleby, P't 1 1. 20 

232. Monarch of Mincing 

Lane 20 

233. Eight Years' Wanderings 

in Ceylon 20 

234. Pictures from Italy 15 

23 5. Adventures of Philip, Ptl.15 

Adventures of Philip, Pt II. 15 
236. Knickerbocker History 
' of New York 20 



237. The Boy at Mugby 10 

238. The Virginians, Part I.. 20 
The Virginians, Part II. 20 

239. Erling the Bold 20 

240. Kenelm Chillingly 20 

241. Deep Down 20 

242. Samuel Brohl & Co 20 

243. Gautran 20 

244. Bleak House, Part I 20 

Bleak House, Part 1 1... 20 

245. What Will He Do With 

It ? 2 Parts, each 20 

2 46. Sketches of YoungCouples. 10 

247. Devereux 20 

248. Life of Webster, Part 1. 15 
Life of Webster, Pt. II. 15 

249. The Crayon Papers 20 

250. The Caxtons, Part I 15 

TheCaxtons, Part 1 1... 15 

251. Autobiography of An- 

thony Trollope 20 

252. Critical Reviews, etc. ... 10 

253. Lucretia 20 

254. Peter the Whaler 20 

255. Last of the Barons. Pt 1. 15 
Last of the Barons, Pt. 1 1. 15 

256. Eastern Sketches 15 

257. All in a Garden Fair 20 

258. File No. 113 20 

259. The Parisians, Part I.. .20 
The Parisians, Part II.. 20 

260. Mrs. Darling's Letters. . .20 

261. Master Humphrey's 
Clock 10 

262. Fatal Boots, etc 10 

263. The Alhambra 15 

264. The Four Georges 10 

265. Plutarch's Lives, 5 Pts. fi. 

266. Under the Red Flag 10 

267. TheHaunted House, etc. 10 

268. When the Ship Comes 
Home 10 

269. One False, both Fair.... 20 

270. The Mudfog Papers, etc. 10 

271. My Novel, 3 Parts, each.20 

272. Conquest of Granada. ..20 

273. Sketches by Boz 20 

274. A Christmas Carol, etc . 15 

275. lone Stewart 20 

276. Harold, 2 Parts, each. . . 15 

277. Dora Thome 20 

278. Maid of Athens. 20 

279. Conquest of Spain 10 

280. Fitzboodle Papers, etc.. 10 

28r. Bracebridge Hall 20 

282. Uncommercial Traveller. 20 
2 83 . Roundabout Papers 20 

284. Rossmoyne 20 

285. A Legend of the Rhine, 

etc 4 10 

286. Cox's Diary, etc 10 

287. Beyond Pardon 20 

288. Somebody'sLuggage,etc. 10 

289. Godolphin 20 

290. Salmagundi 20 

291. Famous Funny Fellows. 20 

292. Irish Sketches, etc 20 

293. The Battle of Life, etc... 10 

294. Pilgrims of the Rhine ... 15 

295. Random Shots 20 

296. Men's Wives 10 

297. Mystery of Edwin Drood.20 



298. 
299. 

300. 

301. 

302. 

3°3- 
304. 
305. 
306, 
307, 
30S, 

309 

310 

3". 

312, 

313 
3M 

3i5 
316 
3i7 
3i8 
3i9- 
320, 
321. 

322. 
323- 
324- 
325- 
326. 
327. 
328. 
329- 
330. 
33i. 
332. 
333- 
33* 
335' 
336. 
337- 
338. 
339- 
340. 
34'. 
342. 
343- 
344. 
345- 

346. 

347- 
348. 
349- 
350- 
35'« 

352. 
353- 

354- 
355- 

356. 
357- 
358. 
359- 

360. 



Reprinted Pieces 20 

Astoria 20 

Novels by Eminent Handsio 
Companions of Columbus2o 

No Thoroughfare 10 

Character Sketches, etc. 10 

Christmas Books 20 

1 A Tour on the Prairies... 10 

, Ballads 15 

, Yellowplush Papers 10 

, Life of Mahomet, Part 1. 15 
Life of Mahomet, Pt. II. 15 
, Sketches and Travels in 

London 10 

. Oliver Goldsmith,Irving.20 
, Captain Bonneville .... 20 

Golden Girls 20 

. English Humorists 15 

. Moorish Chronicles 10 

. Winifred Power 20 

. Great HoggartyDiamond 10 

, Pausanias 15 

. The New Abelard 20 

, A Real Queen 20 

The Rose and the Ring.20 
Wolfert's Roost and Mis- 
cellanies, by Irving. • • • 10 

Mark Seawo'rth 20 

Life of Paul Jones 20 

Round the World 20 

Elbow Room 20 

The Wizard's Son 25 

Harry Lorrequer 20 

How It All Came Round. 20 
Dante Rosetti's Poems. 20 

The Canon's Ward 20 

Lucile, by O. Meredith. 20 
Every Day Cook Book .. z 
Lays of Ancient Rome.. 20 

Life of Burns 20 

The Young Foresters. . . 2c 
John Bull andHis Island 20 
Salt Water, by Kingston. 2.. 

The Midshipman 20 

Proctor's Poems 20 

Clayton's Rangers 20 

Schiller's Poems r 20 

Goethe's Faust 20 

Goethe's Poems 20 

Life of Thackeray 10 

Dante's Vision of Hell, 
Purgatory and Paradise. .20 

An Interesting Case 20 

Life of Byron, Nichol. . . 10 

Life of Bunyan 10 

Valerie's Fate 1 

Grandfather Lickshingle.ro 
Lays of the Scottish Ca- 
valiers 2 r ' 

Willis' Poems 20 

Tales cf the French Re- 
volution 15 

Loom and Lugger . . 20 

More Leaves from a Life 

in the Highlands 15 

Hvgiene of the Brain. ..25 

Berkeley the Banker 20 

Homes Abroad 15 

Scott's Lady of the Lake, 

with notes....... 20 

Modern Christianity a 
civilized Heathenism.. ..15 



THE CELEBRATED 



SOHMER 



Grand, Square and Upright 




PIANOFORTES. 

The demands now made by an educated musical public are so exacting that very few 
Pianoforte Manufacturers can produce Instruments that will stand the test which merit 
requires. SOHMER & CO., as Manufacturers, rank amongst these chosen few, who are 
acknowledged to be makers of standard instruments. In these days, when Manufacturers 
urge the low price of their wares rather than their superior quality as an inducement ,to 
purchase, i t may not be amiss to suggest that, in a Piano, quality and price are too in- 
separably joined to expect the one without the other. 

Every Pianc ought to be judged as to the quality of its tone, its touch, and its work- 
manship; if any one of these is wanting in excellence, however good the others may be, 
the instrument w 11 be imperfect. It is the combination of these qualities in the highest 
degree that ' :■• vtitutes the perfect Piano, and it is this combination that has given the 
" SOHMER i -; honorable position with the trade and the public. 

Received First Prize Centennial Exhibition, Philadelphia, 1876. 
Received First Prize at Exhibition, Montreal, Canada, 1881 & 1882. 

SOHMER & CO., Manufacturers, 

149-155 E. 14th St., New York. 



; 



